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More
than a century and a half ago Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Tell-Tale
Heart", in which a young man decides to kill a kind old man who
"never wronged" him, simply because "he had the eye
of a vulture." When he was about to commit the murder, he heard
a "low, dull, quick sound"; it was "the beating of
the [terrified] old man's heart."
After suffocating the
old man, he dismembered the corpse and carefully concealed the parts
under the floor planks. The old man's last shriek before dying,
however, alarmed the neighbors, who called the police. Upon their
arrival, the young man received them with confidence, even inviting
them to search the old man's room, bringing chairs for them, and
"in the wild audacity of [his] perfect triumph, [he] placed
his own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse
of the victim.
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| He began to hear a ringing sound, which grew in intensity despite
all his attempts to speak louder to cover it up. I grew louder by
the minute, until he felt that he "must scream or die."
"Anything was better than this agony," he thought, until
he finally screamed, "I admit the deed!-tear up the planks!-It
is the beating of his hideous heart!" |
| The second Palestinian intifada is to Israel the tell-tale
heart of the old Palestine, which obstinately refused to rest in peace,
even after a half century after it was dismembered, entombed and shrouded
in forgetfulness. |
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