I switched the radio off, unable to take anymore grisly international news. Then I experienced a moment of extreme guilt, switching it back on again and forcing myself to listen to the details.

Why did I do this? What difference could it possibly have made to anyone whether I listened to the story or not? Whether I knew the official body count, or the name of the town where it happened?

To show respect, or bear witness? It's something about feeling engaged, about being in and of the world, if only via constant, rolling news bulletins.

Growing up, we always had a radio on in every room. Dad worked here, as the cartoonist at The Canberra Times, and had to be across everything that was happening, all of the time. He could never switch off, and still can't, years into retirement. Radios on, everywhere, all the time.

I'm the same, although not as politically-minded. Once you're across everything, it's almost impossible to switch off and suddenly find yourself behind. Best to just stay on top of it all. It's like casually tuning into a soap opera more than two days in a row, and suddenly finding yourself invested enough to just keep watching.

But mass shootings and wars and bushfires and murders aren't soap operas.

The literary event, by the way, was a Q&A between the author Charlotte Wood and me, about her new novel, Stone Yard Devotional.

It's the fictional journal of an unnamed woman who, having suffered a crisis of some kind, fetches up in a secluded religious community on the Monaro and ends up staying, thus abandoning her life of environmental activism, and her husband.

She, in Wood's words, "unsubscribes from her life", choosing one of silence and contemplation instead. And the book is about how impossible it is, ultimately, to keep the outside world out.

It's a fascinating topic to grapple with, and the book has no answers. There's a scene in which the protagonist goes through her emails and literally unsubscribes from all the mailing lists, one by one. This, I say, is a kind of fantasy for anyone who listens to the news and generally engages with the world. I fantasise about logging off and tuning out, but I can't bring myself to do it.

Because how can you, with these children in Gaza, babies dying in humidicribs? Whole families killed. A bottomless chasm of fear, despair and deprivation, there before our eyes in real time, but thousands of kilometres across the world.

Yet here I am, flicking a switch to see the room flooded with light, a flourishing green tree shading the window. A pantry full of food. Clean water pouring from the tap. No thoughts of whether I or my family might die today, any second. How can this be possible? I feel I need to be cognisant of it, as a bare minimum.

We're all ignorant to varying degrees, with vast and diverse knowledge blind spots. But there are times when I find ignorance personally unacceptable. And I'm not referring specifically to the large number of young people who can't name a single member of the Beatles, or the fact the average Canberran on the street wouldn't know who the ACT treasurer is.

I'm thinking more of the kinds of people who just "don't follow the news", in a shrugging kind of way, as though "the news" is in the same category as relatively niche topics like Succession, or the cricket.

And it's OK to not know much about these things. There's nothing in inherently wrong with being oblivious to, say, Taylor Swift or Uniqlo or the latest Netflix special or the Matildas.

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That's fine. But not keeping up with the news? Not being aware, as much as it's possible to be, of what's happening in the Middle East, or where houses are being destroyed by bushfires, or a terrible tragedy that convulses the national news every now and again?

And to claim that you just "can't be bothered" following it all?

I find it unforgivable, without quite being able to articulate why, except that I just can't seem to look away.