I only learned this week, (too late! too late?) that All Souls, the graduate college at Oxford University, for over a century used a very particular entry exam, the hardest exam in the world, apparently. Each year only a handful of the brightest Oxford graduates were picked to sit this exam and often only one was successful in passing the test.
I learned that the test was scrapped in May 2010 because it was ‘too difficult’ (to undergo or to examine?). It seems, even the greatest minds of our age quake at the remembrance of it. It was an initiation test, a trial by word. Many simply couldn’t manage the One-Word Essay Question.
Candidates were required to open an envelope inside of which was a card with a single word – such as ‘innocence’ or ‘morality’ – and they were asked to write coherently about the subject for three hours. Three hours! Most business writers are lucky to get 30 minutes to file a ‘coherent’ report, prepare ‘coherent’ copy or (God forbid) write the weekly blog, ‘coherently’!
The One-Word Essay Question was scrapped because the head of All Souls, Sir John Vickers, a former member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee said that the essay had ‘not proved useful’ as a test of the qualities for admission namely, the ‘exceptional analytical ability, breadth and depth of knowledge, independent-mindedness and clarity of thought and expression.’
I guess not. Perhaps because the One-Word Essay Question is meant to reveal in the candidates (and examiners?) a sense of connectedness, an ability to see the whole instead of the sum of its parts, a talent for adding one plus one and finding the answer to be eleven, not two, a joy in the faces of conundrum, paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. Perhaps the test demonstrated that the Oxford graduates didn’t know their own minds and therefore could not show their degree of independence or dependence on others.
The One-Word Essay Question is a test of character, personality, spontaneity, imagination and creativity. It was a test my mother set me once, a long time ago, when during one very long and hot summer holiday I complained that I was bored because all of my friends had gone off to summer camp to learn survival skills, team spirit and be eaten alive by mosquitoes, black fly and perhaps a black bear. Canadian summertime and the livin’ was not easy. For me, it was unpredictable and boring, all at the same time.
Cruel thing. I tried to turn her test into a game, but she wouldn’t play, wouldn’t compete. She liked to keep her thoughts to herself. Instead of the envelope, she made me lug the heavy tome of Webster’s Encyclopaedia off the top of the piano and place it on her lap. Then she took her long dagger-like nail file and plunged it into the heart of its yellowing, tissue paper pages. I feared she would tear the heart out of it, but she didn’t. She ran her red-enameled index fingernail down the columns until she found a word suitable to my mood and her capricious temper. ‘Queue’. She gave me three hours to think about it.
* * *
This week, I spent Thursday morning at a very cold and blustery but, thankfully, not rainy Farnborough aerodrome, at the Wind Tunnels. I queued, along with a few thousand other stalwarts, for the filming of a British institution – the BBC’s Antique’s Roadshow. The Brit’s are renowned for their love of queueing. I don’t suppose they actually love it but are acculturated to it. A patient, polite, considerate, sense of fair play, wait your turn, the meek shall inherit the earth kind of culture. Canadians, I am told have it too. It’s the kind of culture that lets you stand, shuffle and eventually get to the head of a snaking queue two hours after you started at its tail. A friend and I clutched our goodies like everyone else. Bags, suitcases, bubble wrap and tissue enveloped celebrity and punter alike in their quests for ‘treasure’. Questions queued too, waiting hopefully for their answers. “What have you brought?” Then, once presented on the alter of the expert, “What have I got? Am I rich, or do I have something priceless?”
* * *
The summer sun of late afternoon dragged itself down to linger behind the trees. Five o’clock. Three hours earlier I had printed at the top of a blank sheet of paper the word ‘Queue’ and this was as far as I got in my answer to the one-word essay question:
A
sentence
is
one
word
following
another.
An
idea
is
a
trail
of
thoughts
snaking
in
a
queue.
Stay
small
in
your
approach
and
attitude,
but
by
linking,
small
things
grow
into
a
bigger
one.
I flung my pencil down. “Ma. When will I be done? I give up. No more!”
She took a slow drag on her cigarette, a sip from her whisky, the melting ice still offered a warning clink. “Darling, life’s just one damn thing after another.”
Provocations, it seems, come from the damnedest places and they sure can take their time reaching me, but when they do, I can make the connection. Thanks, Ma.
“Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.”
- T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Dante’s Inferno.
Photo credits: copyright 2012; The Secret Archaeologist.
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