YOU KEEP THINKING of the people in that Moscow theater, how their jeopardy seemed to familiar to you. Once, an ordeal like that - masked captors, the bombs, the ticking clock - would have been unimaginable outside of novels, but no more.

Indeed, as you watched the drama unfold, you thought of theaters of your own, and realized that now they, too, will be installing metal detectors. When will you be taken hostage, forced to wait in terror, sharing an orchestra pit for a latrine, fathoming the motives of your masked enemies, secretly using your cellphone, weeping with anxiety, whispering to your fellow prisoners, until you are all overcome by gas, perhaps to be rescued into the nightmare of having survived?

The cruelty of strangers, however motivated, takes your breath away - but that, too, seems like something close at hand. Just moments before Moscow, weren't you obsessively imagining yourself in Washington, D.C., where the seized-theater had been the city itself? For weeks you have not pumped gasoline without looking around at the lost innocence of the world. How long is it since you felt safe?

What was it like in Moscow? You take the story of Pierre Bezukhov as an instance, how he was stunned to find himself captured by fanatical invaders. When they announced their intention to begin shooting their prisoners, Bezukhov was put in the line, No. 6. He felt, you read, ''as if part of his soul had been torn away. He lost the power of thinking or understanding. He could only hear and see. And he had only one wish - that the frightful thing that had to happen should happen quickly.''

Bezukhov was forced to watch as his fellow captives were shot dead, one after the other, a horror beyond anything he had ever experienced. He never expected to be spared, but he was - and then came the real surprise. Instead of feeling sweet relief at having escaped murder, he was even more devastated. ''It was as if the mainspring of his life, on which everything depended and which made everything appear alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of meaningless rubbish faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity, in his own soul, and in God, had been destroyed.''

Pierre Bezukhov, of course, is the central figure of Leo Tolstoy's ''War and Peace,'' and the marauding hostage-takers are French invaders, not Chechens. That Tolstoy's war of 1812 can have such pointed resonance reminds you what the great novel is for. Its revelations apply forever. You needn't be directly a casualty of terror to have part of your soul ripped out. You needn't even have read the novel. You, too, through the mere newspaper and television, have felt the mainspring of order tampered with by recent horrors.

Pierre Bezukhov came to his nightmare from a life of privilege, not unlike yours, and it chastens you to realize that wanton cruelty and random violence define the limits of life for most human beings. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of this year's traumas, and the even greater ones that threaten from the shadows, have left you shaken to the core. Not only that. Your faith in the ''right ordering of the universe'' has been tied to a hope that your own nation's purposes, however ambiguous, are still more aligned to that ''right ordering'' than not.

Yet now you worry that some mainspring has been wrenched, also, out of America's moral intuition, threatening to reduce the nation's traditional regard for others - defined variously by prudent statecraft, a preference of diplomacy over war, an innate generosity, the dream of democracy - to a heap of meaningless rubbish called American Empire.

What does it do to you - not only to witness at close hand (close as the TV on the kitchen counter) the manifestation of breathtaking cruelty, but to feel yourself next in line as its victim? Does it harden you to such cruelty? Prepare you to become cruel yourself? The sniper in Washington, the hostage-takers in Moscow, the widow-bombers, the gas-wielding commandos, and the high-tech wizards of laser bombs above Iraq are all on the same continuum. Defense becomes offense, the protection of your children becomes the murder of another's, his threat becomes your preemption. You kill to stop the killing. Then you wonder, Are you the victim, or the slayer? But you are both.

''What does all this mean?'' Tolstoy asks in his epilogue. ''Why did it happen? What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events? What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself.'' So why should you not ask them? And why should your soul not be troubled - to find itself taken hostage again by war?

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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