The same ordinary world

From Alice Munro's story "The View from Castle Rock," in The New Yorker 8/29/05:

"This is what Mary sees plainly in those moments of anguish: that the world which has turned into a horror for her is still the same ordinary world for all these other people and will remain so even if James has truly vanished, even if he has crawled through the ship's railings--she has noticed everywhere the places where this would be possible--and been swallowed by the ocean. The most brutal and unthinkable of all events, to her, would seem to most others like a sad but not extraordinary misadventure. It would not be unthinkable to them."

The story is about Scottish immigrants aboard a transatlantic ship in 1818, and it's quite good.