Letter 21: Ouch! My Back and The Beating Heart in the Floorboard

Dear Tim:

Again, thank you for the comment on my reply of the last week! Seeing your comment, I felt utterly distressed with myself: I didn’t mention the connection between owls and Athena!

Yes, I do know that owl is a symbolization of Athena, and that, is also one of the reasons I love owls. Athena has always been my favorite deity in the Greek pantheon, for her being the goddess of wisdom, art craft, and war tactics. She was looking after Odysseus for the whole ten years on his journey of ordeal, giving him a hand whenever she had the chance to; she stopped Achilles from physically confronting Agamemnon even though we all agree that Agamemnon is a lame commander. She blessed Diomedes with special powers so that the Greeks had advantage during the Trojan War. (I’m sorry, the topics I’ve studied relatively thorough was the era where The Trojan took place) And there are so many more stories so let’s put it until next time.

There is something wrong with my back. (ouch)

About two weeks ago, the lower part of my back started hurting rather severely. I often believe that my back is like an old man’s, but after a few days the pain did neither subside nor fade; it simply turned worse. Therefore, I asked my mom to take me to the hospital. I took an x-ray shoot right away, but he didn’t see anything wrong with it, so he arranged an MRI for me, which I took on 3/19. Today is 3/21, and Mom and I went back to the hospital for the results, and the doctor said that they found a small fracture on a small part of my backbone (not my spine, fortunately) around my lower back. To make any other treatments, the doctor suggest us to take a CT scan first before we do anything else, but “it’s pretty sure that a surgery is needed.” The whole injury was so bizarre because it had already been a long while since I fell or obtained any injury that would affect my back. The doctor also said that it would be better if I go for the surgery two years later, by when I’d be 18, an adult. However, that would mean pain for the future two years… I can’t even carry my backpack without feeling hurt right now…

So, I hope that I’ll be able to do the surgery.

Time for literature!

So the book(or the story) I'm going to talk about is The Tell-tale Heart, by American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. But first, I want to talk about the genre of the book.

Edgar Allan Poe himself

When hearing the word Goth, architecture (or sometimes fashion) came to our minds first, as "Gothic literature" has some relationship to Gothic architecture. "Gothic literature" refers to stories that inflict horror and fear to the readers as they talk about death, madness, plague, with occasional romance. Starting from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764, there were a lot of books written by different authors and was labeled as a "Gothic fiction", including The Mysterious Case of Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson(I haven't read this one but know what it is about, and I'm looking forward to reading it some day) and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. However, when it comes to Gothic literature, we can't finish the list without mentioning the three authors and their works. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and basically all the works by Edgar Allan Poe.(e.g. The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of Red Death, and of course, The Tell-tale Heart)

A heart in the floorboard; a T-shirt I have hoped for for over a year.

Edgar's stories are never too far from death and murder, and The Tell-tale Heart is no exception.

The story begins with a crazy young man whose name wasn't mentioned in the book, claimed that he had extremely sensitive senses and he had planned to kill his old blinded roommate simply because he had the “eye of a vulture” and that was why he stayed up and spied on him almost every night. Just one day, when the young man was peering through the door, he accidentally woke the old man up and he killed the old man instantly.

To hide what he did from the others, the young man calmly cut the poor old man into bits and lifted the wooden floorboards and hid him inside and kept on claiming that if he was smart (well he used the word “sagacity”) enough to do this job, how crazy can he be?. Upon barely finishing his job, there came a ring at the door; it was the police, for a regular check. The young man let the police in with an easy smile as he toured them around in his house. Seeing someone with such an easygoing demeanor, the police believed that nothing was wrong and stayed a little longer to chat with the man.

Just then, he heard a faint but steady low sound. It was rhythmic, audible and it wouldn’t stop. The sound was confusing to the man. “Louder, louder, louder!”; it sounded like heartbeats, drumming next to the man’s ears…

It must be the conspiracy of the police, a scheme to make me admit my crime, the man pondered, as the heartbeat was practically so loud that the others must have heard it. “Louder, louder, louder!”

Then he could stand it no more. He gave a shout and said, “Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deeds!—Tear up the planks! Here, here! It’s the beating of his hideous heart!”

The whole plot was so creepy that it was actually terrifyingly absorbing, and I love this story more than the other ones I’ve known.

Would you believe, that if I say that Spongebob, the “carefree” cartoon has once used a reference of The Tell-tale Heart in an episode?

There was an episode called “Squeaky Boots” and it was a parallel of the Tell-tale Heart! That was the moment I believe that Spongebob is a really creepy series of cartoon…

Saint Patrick’s Day puns!!!

So this one is from Aubrey, a few days ago: I-rish you a lucky day with a four-leafed clover emoji behind. It was a pun well played, so I have to give the credit to her for that.

Another one:

Last, about the Cup Song, it brought me some wonderful memories. It was one of the songs my classmates in junior high performed on our graduation trip two years ago. Since graduating, I seldom contacted them, only a small visit every long break. It was true that I seldom went out with them when we were still in the same class, but they are and will always be my friends nonetheless. Man do I miss them!

Tim, do you still keep in touch with your classmates even until now?

Best regards, Hugo, 3/22/2017