Sometimes -- make that usually -- the range of rational reactions to life on this planet seems dismally narrow, beginning with bafflement, passing through exasperation and rage, and ending in sorrow. We may distract or console ourselves with the doings of babies and small animals, the pleasures of music or books or sports or nature, and the contemplation of such acts of human kindness or heroism as the media bother to mention. But always, beyond the tiny zone of happiness that each of us works so hard to make and keep, there looms a nightmarish world in which somewhere, every minute of every day, somebody else's life is going up in flames -- conflagrations that are ignited, moreover, mostly by other human beings. So-called acts of God (strange that we reserve the term for disasters) are few and far between, compared to the disastrous acts of man.

Just last week, in a story that captured this sense of disjunction perfectly, a Japan Times columnist wrote about the unexpectedly sobering "hanami" party he had attended the night before. One guest, who knew the terrain of northern Macedonia well, confessed that he felt unable to enter into the spirit of the occasion because he was thinking about the Kosovar refugees huddled in those freezing, inhospitable hills.

Despite the damper he threw on the party, the man was surely right. Sometimes grief compounded by anger is not just the rational but the only possible response to such horrors, especially when nerves are sensitized, like his, by firsthand knowledge. It may not be a prelude to action, since there is usually no opportunity to help even if one had the slightest idea how to, but it is indispensable to the haphazard daily effort most of us make to judge fairly and act decently in our own lives. A capacity to feel for others is a sine qua non of even the most rudimentary morality.