In The Brothers Karamazov Grushenka tells the fable of the little onion*.  A vicious old woman dies and goes to hell, but her guardian angel, straining his memory, recalls that she once, only once, gave a beggar the gift of a little onion she had dug up from her garden.  He holds the little onion out to her, and the old woman grasps it and is lifted out of the flames of hell.  This fable has always struck me as revolting: what human monster did not throughout his life make the gift of a little onion, if not to others, to his children, his wife, his dog?  That single, immediately erased instant of pity is certainly not enough to absolve Muhsfeldt**.  It is enough, however, to place him too, although at its extreme boundary, within the gray band, that zone of [moral] ambiguity.'\n\n *http://quotesfromtheunderground.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/brothers-karamazov/\n\n **http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Muhsfeldt

• dostoyevsky
• morality
• life
• memory
• children
• hell