‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.’

Her thought extends beyond ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of global suffering on a scale beyond our homely ken, but to life itself in its unfathomable abundance: the dramas, the joys and the sorrows and the sheer activity that surrounds us and would engulf us if we paused for long enough to think about everything.