An odd thing has happened in the wake of the disaster in London three weeks ago in which two commuter trains collided, killing as many as 100 -- or was it only 30? -- people. The tally has dropped sharply since the accident, as police find many of those who were initially presumed dead turning up alive and well. Some had simply gone about their business, not realizing they had ever been counted among the victims. Some, in a malign plot twist worthy of Charles Dickens, were reported missing by spouses eager to get their hands on jointly owned marital property. But a few enterprising passengers took the accident as an opportunity to act out a common fantasy.

Realizing they would be considered dead, they caught the next train to Heathrow airport and took off for foreign parts to start brand-new lives. Most of them apparently changed their minds and returned home after a few days. But some are presumably still out there, getting used to the fit of assumed identities, manufacturing personal histories, still imagining that they can actually escape what the 19th-century English novelist George Eliot once called "the small, hampering, threadlike pressures" of everyday life -- less elegantly known as the ties that bind.

It is hard not to sympathize with the urge, or to admire the literal-minded "get-up-and-go" spirit of these absconders. Escape is, after all, the main motivating factor in much of what people do: take vacations, get divorced, change jobs, put the children in boarding school, even -- in the most desperate cases -- kill themselves.