Instructions: Write a comparative commentary on one of the following pairs of texts. Include comments on the similarities and differences between the texts and the significance of context, audience, purpose, and formal and stylistic features.
Text A
It was in many ways a good summer. There were few storms and we were out almost every day and we lost a minimum of gear and seemed to land a maximum of fish and I tanned dark and brown after the manner of my uncles.
My father did not tan—he never tanned—because of his reddish complexion, and the salt water irritated his skin as it had for sixty years. He burned and reburned over and over again and his lips still cracked so that they bled when he smiled, and his arms, especially the left, still broke out into the oozing salt-water boils as they had ever since as a child I had first watched him soaking and bathing them in a variety of ineffectual solutions […]
And I saw then, that summer, many things that I had seen all my life as if for the first time and I thought that perhaps my father had never been intended for a fisherman physically or mentally. At least not in the manner of my uncles; he had never really loved it. And I remembered that, one evening in his room when we were talking about David Copperfield[1], he had said that he had always wanted to go to the university and I had dismissed it then in the way one dismisses one's father saying he would like to be a tight-rope walker, and we had gone on to talk about the Peggottys[2] and how they loved the sea.
And I thought then to myself that there were many things wrong with all of us and all our lives and I wondered why my father, who was himself an only son, had not married before he was forty and then I wondered why he had. I even thought that perhaps he had had to marry my mother and checked the dates on the flyleaf of the Bible where I learned that my oldest sister had been born a prosaic eleven months after the marriage, and I felt myself then very dirty and debased for my lack of faith and for what I had thought and done.
And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations. And I knew then that I could never leave him alone to suffer the iron-tipped harpoons[3] which my mother would forever hurl into his soul because he was a failure as a husband and a father who had retained none of his own. And I felt that I had been very small in a little secret place within me and that even the completion of high school was for me a silly shallow selfish dream.
So I told him one night very resolutely and very powerfully that I would remain with him as long as he lived and we would fish the sea together. And he made no protest but only smiled through the cigarette smoke that wreathed his bed and replied, "I hope you will remember what you've said."
Excerpted from the short story, “The Boat,” from Island: The Collected Stories
Alistair MacLoed, 2000.
Text B
“Those Winter Sundays”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering,breaking.
Whenthe rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who haddriven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’saustere[4]and lonely offices[5]?
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
From Collected Poems by Robert Hayden, 1966
Text C
When they told me they were going to induct my friend George Harrison[6] into the Hollywood Bowl Hall[7] of Fame posthumously[8]: my first thought was – I bet he won’t show up.
Because, unlike some others one might mention – but won’t – he really wasn’t in to honors. He was one of those odd people who believe that life is somehow more important than show business.
Which I know is a heresy here in Hollywood, and I’m sorry to bring it up here in the very Bowel of Hollywood but I can hear his voice saying “oh very nice, very useful, a posthumous award – where am I supposed to put it? What’s next for me then? A posthumous Grammy? An ex-Knighthood? An After-Lifetime Achievement Award? He’s going to need a whole new shelf up there.
So: posthumously inducted – sounds rather unpleasant: sounds like some kind of after-life enema[9]. But Induct – in case you are wondering – comes from the word induce – meaning to bring on labor by the use of drugs.
And Posthumous is actually from the Latin post meaning after and hummus meaning Greek food.
So I like to think that George is still out there somewhere – pregnant and breaking plates at a Greek restaurant.
I think he would prefer to be inducted posthumorously because he loved comedians – poor sick sad deranged lovable puppies that we are – because they – like him – had the ability to say the wrong thing at the right time – which is what we call humor. He put Monty Python[10] on here at The Hollywood Bowl, and he paid for the movie The Life of Brian, because he wanted to see it. Still the most anybody has ever paid for a Cinema ticket.
His life was filled with laughter and even his death was filled with laughter… In the hospital he asked the nurses to put fish and chips in his IV. The doctor – thinking he was delusional – said to his son “don’t worry, we have a medical name for this condition.”
Yes said Dahni[11], “humor.” And I’m particularly sorry Dahni isn’t here tonight – because I wanted to introduce him by saying “Here comes the son” – but sadly that opportunity for a truly bad joke has gone, as has Dahni’s Christmas present from me.
George once said to me “if we’d known we were going to be The Beatles we’d have tried harder.”
What made George special – apart from his being the best guitarist in the Beatles – was what he did with his life after they achieved everything. He realized that this fame business was – and I’ll use the technical philosophical term here – complete bullshit.
And he turned to find beauty and truth and meaning in life – and more extraordinarily – found it […]
So this is the big drag about posthumous awards: there’s no one to give ‘em to. So I’m gonna keep this and put it next to the one I got last year. No, I’m going to give it to the love of his life, his dark sweet lady, dear wonderful Olivia Harrison, who is with us here tonight. Liv, you truly know what it is to be without him.
Thank you Hollywood Bowl you do good to honor him. Goodnight.
From euglogy for George Harrison by Eric Idle, December 2001
Text D
Food, music, death – these are the Viennese obsessions, and it often seems as though the first two are so much whipped cream sweetening the third. Among the tourist attractions the Viennese hold most dear is the Kaisergruft, the vault in which the fanatically elaborate and macabre tombs of the Habsburg are kept. And not far from that is Zum Schwarzen Kameel, a gleaming lunch restaurant where you can eat the tantalizing open-faced sandwiches that are a Viennese specialty and listen to Peter Weiser explain that the most devout wish of every Viennese is to have a schöne Leiche – which means a lovely funeral, or, more literally, “a beautiful corpse.” To a typical Viennese, his funeral is the central event of his, um, life.
“Funerals are the most important thing we do,” says Weiser, “So funeral dress and behavior is very strict. You don’t wear makeup, no sunglasses, and everything black. Black suit – not navy blue – white shirt, black tie, black socks, black shoes. Even the poor have to have a funeral outfit. I remember once I had a black trench coat and it got soiled and my wife panicked. She said, ‘You need to get a new one, quick. What if there’s a funeral? Not ‘What if it rains?’ but ‘What if there’s a funeral?’ We tend to be rather morbid here in Vienna.”
Rather. Where else would you find a place like the Elektropathologisches Museum, which concerns itself with those who have “made an exit” by dint of lightning and other electrocutions? What other city has not one but two museums devoted to wax replicas of the human body and its parts – the Josepinum, in which the wax bodies are generally “healthy” (student army surgeons used them before the dissection of actual cadavers[12] became customary), and the ominous Narrenturm, a scary cylindrical tower build in 1784 to house mental patients and now used to display icky wax re-creations of various diseases.
If this isn’t thrill enough, Vienna has the only museum in any European capital devoted entirely to funerals, the Bestattungsmuseum, at Goldeggasse 19. You get in by appointment only, and an affable Viennese gentleman named Heinz Riedel, who runs the place, shows you around with a subtle smile on his face, exuding Schmäh[13] in waves. The funeral museum is not just about the pomp that goes into les pompes funèbres[14]. It’s about the peculiar refinements that only a populace that thinks about death all the time could have hatched. Here, for instance, is an innovation promoted briefly by the beloved eighteenth century Emperor Joseph II[15] as a cost-saving measure. It’s a coffin fitted with a removable bottom: You suspend the thing over the open grave, slide the bottom out, drop the corpse, and then carry the coffin for reuse. A swell idea, and it was only because of an unprecedented outburst of public dismay that the emperor withdrew it six months after its introduction in 1784. Nearby, an elaborate toy: You wind a key and miniature funeral procession marches by, diorama-style, while a hidden music box produces tinkly Diabelli[16] and your average [but rich] nineteenth-century child presumably undergoes paroxysms [17]of delight. A glass case across the way exhibits various elaborately painted skulls from Salzburg[18] – painted because burial space there was scare and disinterred bones were thought unsightly without a little decoration.
From “Peeling Away the Masks of Vienna” by Stephen Schiff
The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places Volume II. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Print.
[1] David Copperfield: a nineteenth-century novel by the English author Charles Dickens
[2] ThePeggottyfamily are fictional characters inCharles Dickens's 1850novelDavid Copperfield.
[3] harpoons: barbed spears with rope attached, for catching whales and fish
[4] austere: severe or plain
[5] offices: duties or functions assigned to someone
[6] George Harrison (1943-2001): an English musician, multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter and music and film producer who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles.
[7] TheHollywood Bowl: 1920samphitheaterin theHollywoodarea ofLos Angeles, California,United Statesthat is used primarily for musicperformances.
[8] posthumously: occurring after one’s death
[9] enema: the injection of a fluid into the rectum to cause a bowel movement
[10] Monty Python: British surreal comedy group who created their sketch comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus, that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series.
[11] Dhani Harrison: an English multi-instrumentalist musician and singer-songwriter who is the only child ofGeorge HarrisonandOlivia Harrison.
[12] cadaver: a dead body often prepared for dissection
[13] Schmäh: slang for friendly (and sometimes naughty) Austrian humor
[14] Les pompes funèbres: French for ‘funeral’
[15] Joseph II: Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790 and ruler of the Habsburg lands from 1780 to 1790. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I, and was the brother of Marie Antoinette. He was born and buried in Vienna, Austria.
[16] Anton Diabelli (1781-1858): an Austrian music publisher, editor and composer. Best known in his time as a publisher, he is most familiar today as the composer of the waltz on which Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his set of thirty-three Diabelli Variations
[17] paroxysms: a sudden attack or outburst of a particular emotion or activity.
[18] Salzburg: the fourth-largest city in Austria and the capital of the federal state of Salzburg.