6m
The Sensitometer
Author:
Vrtanes Papazyan (70)
Reader: Hayk Petrosyan (258)
Category:
Prose (621)
Short story (657)
Armenian literature (374)
Age Recommendation: 13+
"The Sensitometer" is an allegory about a Brahmin who, inspired by the self-sacrifice of two starving children, invents a device using "orphan's tears" to measure human feeling . He sets 100 degrees using the self-sacrificing boy's heart, but the tears freeze solid when touched by a famously "virtuous" and pious woman, revealing her cold heart. Enraged, she denounces the device as satanic and incites a mob to destroy it, leaving the world with no way to measure true virtue.