Read the quotes and answer the question:
" Living in the apartment has become bad for me, I think; but notonly that. If I lived in the magistrate's villa on the quietest street in town,holding sittings of the court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting everymorning, occupying my evenings in the classics, closing my ears to the activitiesof this upstart policeman, if I resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my owncounsel, I might cease to feel like a man who, in the grip of the undertow, givesup the fight, stops swimming, and turns his face towards the open sea and death.But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a babythat wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings theworst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat toomuch; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be norecovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in thehut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up thelantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot findthe end."
Question: What does the word "contingent" mean? What is the significance of one child crying? Why doesn't the life of the town stop, or change, when the cries of the barbarians can be heard through the streets? What does the lantern light symbolize and why is it impossible, symbolically, for the Magistrate to close his eyes again?