Directed Writing: Father-Son Relationship

(b) Later, the writer finds part of his father’s autobiography in the suitcase. In one chapter the father describes his thoughts and feelings about his relationship with his son. Write the opening of the chapter (between 120–150 words). Base your answer closely on the material of the original extract.

It had always been my deepest wish for my son to exceed who I was. It pained me, however, to realize that he expected nothing less himself. He inherited his writing abilities, I wagered, from somewhere in the family. From an early age he demonstrated a curiosity with which I was all too familiar. I would catch him rummaging through my suitcase like a archeologist in search of treasures after I had returned from a business trip. But I never let on. I would always hide little things, simple yet mysterious items that I thought a boy could not resist; sweets and old postcards, a bit of glass from a Parisian bottle factory, but most of all I wished for him to find and to read my journals. But always, he overlooked them. My shameful wish was to know what he might think of them. Would they be intriguing to a boy of thirteen, for if not then how could I publish them?
Yet always I found myself enquiring after his studies. And he would act as though he had never searched through my things. And I, embarrassed, never pressed the matter of that terrible suitcase.

Language Commentary – Father & Son Relationship

2 The following passage describes the writer’s relationship with his father.

(a) Comment on the style and language of the passage. [15]
The piece is an imaginative one, possibly extracted from the autobiography of the writer. The fact that his tone is personal and confidential supports this claim. In the extract, the writer seeks to recount some of the last moments he had with his father and to describe their relationship. He accomplishes this by using parallelism in his descriptions, and his father’s suitcase as an allegory for the relationship that existed between himself and his father.

In the extract, the writer weaves descriptions of his father and himself together, contrasting and comparing both. To this end he avoids visual descriptions and prefers focusing on detailing their character traits, and mannerisms. Both prefer to avoid “feeling too much sorrow. His father, the writer says “had no wish to endure hardship”. This is probably true of the son as well. The irony in this is that they have subsequently landed themselves in a sorrowful, superficial, and ‘trivial’ relationship. It is sad because they cannot truly connect. The cause of this is demonstrated by the father who “assumed his usual jocular, mocking air”. This is how the son knows his father. However, the use of the verb ‘assume’ indicates that this is not how his father really is; instead he has put on this trait as a facade. As the writer reveals in the sixth paragraph the father is “acting”, and tragically it is a “precaution” to ward off any awkwardness between them – this is indicative of the delicate and superficial father-son relationship. They have their “usual roles” that each must play in order to remain in comfortable fellowship.

In fact, it is a “shaming moment” for either of them to break character. To show weakness, or empathy, as demonstrated by the father’s wandering around his son’s study, is unacceptable. Thus their tragic fact about their relationship creates a macabre mood for much of the extract. Showing how the father comes to his son “slightly embarrassed”, the writer describes his father surrendering his suitcase full of notebooks over to him. Metaphorically, the father is extending a hand of friendship toward his son, a plea for genuine connectedness to exist between them. His use of the word “maybe” causes the reader to take pity in him.

Furthermore, the suitcase is a symbol of their relationship. It is a “painful burden” to their father, which shows why he is the first to reach out to his son – it weighs most heavily on him. Conversely, for the son the suitcase is a ‘friend’. It is a ‘powerful connection to his past’ and it was possibly his sole connection to his father. To him it is like a portal. His description of the “scents” and “things”, “cologne” and “foreign countries” illustrate the esthetic depths of this connection. Again, this further emphasizes the tragedy, because rather than actually spend time with him, the son tries to acquaint himself with his father through the suitcase, his father’s occupation and belongings. The son begins to feel the weight of their relationship later on, however, when he refers to the suitcase and the “mysterious weight of its contents”. The use of the word ‘mysterious’ highlights that the son does not fully understand why his relationship with his father weighs so heavily on him. It also implies that he hasn’t opened the suitcase in years. This creates a suspenseful, dark, and foreboding mood for the proceeded segment.

The writer builds on this suspense by describing his ‘fear’ of what he might find in the suitcase. Once again, he will attempt to use the suitcase as a portal to connect with his father, only this time he’s afraid of it. This contrasts with how he used to “rush to open” the suitcase as a child. The reader is shown that the reason for this is that the writer is afraid his “father might be a good writer”. This presents the reader with a paradox, because at the same time the writer “wished to know what his father had written, what he had thought when” he was the age the writer is at this point. The writer thus, longs for a connection, but only so far as his father relates to him; he has no desire to be like his father. In fact, he has done everything in his power to be the opposite of his father. While his father had been a poet, the son became a writer (probably an academic dealing with mostly factual writing). He has pursued writing for twenty-five years whereas his father seemed to have given up writing. There are even minute differences such as the son possessing a “study” as apposed to his father’s portable “library”. All of this seems to stem from a bitter desire for vengeance, probably vengeance for his father’s failures; his failure as a father, his failure as a businessman and his “failure to take literature seriously”. Therefore the son does not take him seriously.

Ultimately, we see the converse parallelism in their relationship. But in the end, the son is shocked to discover his father’s “writerly voice”, a voice he does not recognize as his father’s, but one which he undoubtedly has deployed in his own writing; hence the use of the word “writerly” as apposed to “poet’s voice”, etc. He suspects that his father was not the same person, “might not have been his father” when he wrote. No doubt he wonders if that was the cause of the severing of their relationship. He may wonder if he contributed to the severing and if he was not really his father’s son when he wrote. He questions his “authenticity”. Thus we see the final comparison is between writing and a lack of authenticity. We also see through the parallelism demonstrated in the extract that, although they were both purposefully very unlike each other, both father and son were the same.

“Giving Aid to the Poor Does More Harm than Good” -Negative

-By Adino Trapani

Ladies and Gentlemen, I don’t know about you; but I have been thoroughly rung out here. Does anyone else feel like a sock being pulled from the laundromat of my colleague’s accusations? Giving is not complicated. It’s beauty is in its simplicity. And now you’re telling me that there’s a certain way to do it, a most appropriate formula for the most excellent gift? Fine. Let’s all sit around and hypothesize. If we solve the mystery of the perfect gift, then we’ll never make the mistake of giving to the ‘wrong’ person. Of course, we may miss out on the opportunity to give to a lot of the ‘right’ people in the process. It is your and my right to simply give. My colleague, however, says that ‘irresponsible giving’, of which we are all apparently guilty, is harmful to society. We must approach the poverty-stricken with caution, lest we remind them of their poorness and disrupt the exact science of perfectly giving. I think you’d be at odds with Mother Teresa, sir, who said; “Give, but give until it hurts”. We must not be afraid to take risks.
As my colleague rightly says, the receiver of the gift takes a risk in accepting it from you. Don’t we then owe him as much? We must be willing to risk our money, our time, our love. Without risk, there can be no growth. In fact, the seeds will never be sown in the first place. Risk, as demonstrated by experts on the subject such as Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Mother Teresa, and every explorer, pioneer, or inventor who made a historical breakthrough, produces success. Yes, there are always failures. There are times when our giving will yield no fruit. But we have to start somewhere. “Giving of any kind,” said Mbali Creazzo, “taking action… begins the process of change, and moves us to remember that we are part of a much greater universe.”

Furthermore, giving is only natural. It must occur, frequently, and in various degrees. Let us not disqualify the gift because of its value – my opponent I’m sure would agree. We have no idea what a small gift may render in the future, and we may never see its metamorphosis complete. As Antonio Porchia puts it; “I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received”.

“For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles”. -Barry Lopez.

And I close with this, don’t worry about the appropriateness of the gift, or the depth of the chasm, trust that the gift will bless the receiver, and just take the leap.

Speech: “Giving Aid to the Poor Does More Harm than Good” – Affirmative

Gentlemen, ladies, friends and esteemed colleagues; my opponent and I have been invited to speak to you today about, what I believe to be the most controversial and most frequently debated topic, giving. After all, who can claim to hold the monopoly on the subject? And even if you don’t take to discussing it amongst friends, no doubt you’ve argued with your own conscience. The truth is, most of us don’t even know why we give in the first place. There’s always that nagging doubt in the back of one’s mind, no matter what my colleague would like to believe, that our gifts are badly timed and our targets ignorantly chosen. What becomes of the spare change we give to the beggar? How long will it last him? And how long before he requires the same kind of charity again? Personally, there is no other impact worth having than a lasting impact. As Charles Dudley Warner once said: “The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than its value”. Many of us mistake value for appropriateness, and therefore become irresponsible givers.

One could argue then that the danger in giving lies in its inappropriateness. Trust me, I’ve been on the giving and on the receiving end of many inappropriate gifts. They leave a person feeling empty, wasted, and spent. Think about it, the receiver of the gift has taken a risk in receiving said gift from you. Was the risk worth it longterm? Or did it only leave them feeling envious? “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving,” said George Eliot. So in the end, what we are really doing is boasting in our riches, feeding them crumbs that they acquire a taste for so that they are never tempted to enjoy the same luxuries as us. We label the poor as poor because we treat them as poor. In order to not be poor, you’d have to be rich, but we don’t want them to be rich, because if we did we would give them riches. We would empower them. What a conundrum. That would be a truly appropriate gift.

Consider this, the most stark contrast between the rich and the poor is their ability to give. Imagine not being able to give and you’d know what it feels like to be poor. “It’s bad enough,” someone once said, “to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give someone something you want THEM to have.” If you want to give, empower the poor to be givers. Otherwise, you may as well not give at all.

“The Future is Being Revolutionized” – by Adino Trapani

If you are old enough to remember those pre-iMac days; when hard-drives weighed as much as a small suitcase stuffed with underwear, and the screens were thick and cumbersome and looked like Quasi Moto, then you’ll know how much technology has changed in the last twenty years. I was born in the previous millennium, which sounds impressive until I tell you I was born in 1996. Even so, I got a taste of the limitations surrounding technology in those days. I remember when DVD’s where expensive, and the words “touchscreen” and “portable” only made contact in science fiction telenovelas. Man, have we progressed or what? Imagine what the next twenty years will unveil.

For starters, we might be faced with an even bigger selection than ever before. We owe a lot to people like Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee when it comes to our mobile devices and computers, and the market just keeps on exploding. In this corner, we have Samsung, weighing in at 13% of the market; and in this corner… Apple, weighing in at 15%. Whether its phones, game consoles, tablets, or home computers, the choices have never been more varied, and they’re likely to get even more diverse as time goes on. Not only have the interactive device dreams of the pioneers been realized but they’re being multiplied. Pretty soon, the selling point of a TV will be that it is “more 3D than its competitor”.

Gone are the days of paper glasses with red and green plastic lenses for watching a 3D movie in the cinema. Things are so advanced you can even bring the cinema home with you like Chinese leftovers in a doggy bag. Big screen tv, plus 3D, plus VCR, equals the ultimate home movie experience. Recently, I discovered the Netflix App for iPad which enables you to download movies to watch while you’re on the go. When I was kid, I remember how bad I wanted to have those tv’s that you could have sown into the back of the driver’s and passenger’s seats. That would’ve been helpful on the six-hour-long drive down to the coast. Now, turns out, all you need is a tablet with Wi-Fi. Just imagine how the entertainment business is going to evolve in the next two decades.

Matter of fact, the revolution continues into the travel industry. “If you can dream it, you can do it”. Well I can dream up some pretty big things. Anyone got timeshare in Hawaii? Apparently, they’ll be offering voyages into space soon, just like in that Pixar movie “Wall E”. Have you seen that photograph of Richard Branson in his space suit? Nope, that’s not an Instagram from a costume party, that’s publicity for Virgin Galactic. Looks like they’ve reached the final frontier after all.

However, suppose its not the final frontier? What then? What next? You know, at one point explorers thought the final frontier was the edge of the globe. Turns out, there is none. “Shrug,” says Columbus, “I thought it was India”. But it wasn’t. If twenty years can make we thought could only exist in our dreams into a reality; what else can another twenty years accomplish? The last dimension, the final frontier, will only be reached when mankind ceases dreaming.