No shortage of competitive grandeur exists between Oxford’s many colleges—Christ Church with its sprawling quads and the grey, domed minaret of Tom Tower, standing like a sentinel over its gate; Magdalen with her quiet meadows and sun-kissed trees, bending cool branches over the water where the River Isis meets the grassy shore; the hidden staircases and doorways of New College, walled and enveloped in gardens like a well-kept secret; Exeter College with its stained-glass windows scattering light like priceless gems across the floor of its chapel. Each has unique boast. But no college inspires such awe as the legendary gated halls of All Souls. 

All Souls admits no undergraduates and no outsiders—all applicants must be graduate or postgraduate students from Oxford itself. Those who are successful are made Examination Fellows (that is, full members of the College’s governing body) under full scholarship for a duration of seven years, leaving them free to pursue their academic research uninhibited. Competition is steep. From the over a hundred applicants each year, only two, or on occasion three, are deemed worthy of joining the esteemed echelons of All Souls (that said, there have been years when the College selected no one, presumably because not even one candidate rose to meet their standards of academic supereminence). 

Further adding to legend is the All Souls’ examination. Offered since 1878, it was once a multi-day affair perhaps not unreasonably described as “the hardest exam in the world.” To winnow the wheat from the chaff, the College instituted an exam designed to rigorously test students’ analytical rigour, expository mastery, and intellectual nimbleness. The format: four papers, three hours each, a total of 12 gruelling hours of writing over two days. And, until 2009, the prompt of one essay which simply this: a single word. Pedantry. Decadence. Conformity. Bias. Water. Infinite in scope, yet devilishly hard.

The one-word essay was legendary precisely because it was unique. Not only did it give applicants the chance to flaunt their intellectual agility, but it also demanded a level of wit, courage, and creativity. Little is more daunting than the draw of the infinite—a prompt which could lead anywhere but which must, if you are to have any chance of getting in, lead somewhere. The blank canvas can be filled with anything, but it cannot be filled with just anything. Success demanded both fierce discrimination and wild impartiality, allowing endless possibilities to be explored but, once explored, winnowed and honed through the masterful integration of originality, exposition, and argumentation—a trinity of skills little valued and rarely practiced today. 

The All Souls’ examination was—and is—reserved to an elite coterie of intellectuals, the best among the best—an examination the vast preponderance will never have to (or get to?) challenge. Yet, in its esteemed palms it has offered us, mere intellectual plebeians, one great gift: the examination question list itself. In the interest of some vague kind of transparency, All Souls has published a list of the examination’s legendary one word questions from 1914 to 2009, and, after that, when the one word question paper was (alas!) replaced by more generic (but no more mundane) question prompts, has additionally made public year’s worth of general paper prompts. These, while less daunting than the one-word exam, are no less dazzling, featuring questions such as: “Did people have human rights in the Paelolithic era?” “Devise a new punctuation mark—and defend it,” and “Did death evolve?” Questions that tease the mind, unveil hitherto undiscovered territory, and tantalize readers to answer them, if only just for fun. 

This is, it turns out, precisely what I have decided to do: to use the All Souls examination prompts to inspire my writing and challenge my intellectual agility by demanding that I not only ponder unfamiliar ideas, as one might do over a pint with a stranger in a British pub, but also thoughtfully articulate my thoughts upon them. This is not merely a selfish endeavour, though a certain level of self-interest is involved. Certainly, I do wish to become a better thinker, a better writer, and a more intriguing conversationalist. And without doubt, I do love a good challenge. But more than this, it is also borne out of one of my chief fears for the so-called literate society I find myself in (“so-called” here being said without too much smuggery; where my culture falls short, so often do I, being one of its unfortunate byproducts, despite tantrums to the contrary). My fear is namely this: that although the dream of almost universal literacy has been achieved throughout the Western world, we have taken our learning for granted, treating it as an assumption, as a birthright to be used as we wish—or, more often, to be used very little. Literacy, once held as preeminent among our cultural gods, worshiped by all but served only by those very few who could perform her sacred rites, has since become a mean and petulant godling, more often used to debase than to enlighten, to insult than to converse, to sell than celebrate. No longer revered, it has become a tool wielded by the very best and the very worst of us. However, as Yeats so eloquently penned, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst, are full of passionate intensity.” Even in its more mundane moments, literacy may be used to delight and bring together, as when a father bonds with his daughter over a peanut butter cookie recipe, or to undermine and tear apart, as when the social media rabble joins together to maliciously silence an opponent they deem unworthy of the right to speak, with all the tact and grace of a mindless animal (if I may do such a disservice to animals, though it may perhaps be argued that an animal, at its lowest, is rather acting with all the tact and grace of a social media rabble. But I digress). 

This is not to decry the democratization of literacy. Certainly, that the capacity to read and write, to communicate and be heard, to learn and teach has been broadly spread throughout Western culture is a beautiful and just thing. But the democratization of anything comes at a cost. Few highlight this reality better than French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in his legendary work Democracy in America, highlights as among the woes of democracy that “[a]lmost all extremes are softened or blunted: all that was most prominent is superseded by some mean term, at once less lofty and less low, less brilliant and less obscure, than what before existed in the world.” Literacy has suffered no less than this. We are the most literate generation of all of history, yet our literacy is ill-used. (The role that technology has played in the mediocrity of our literacy is a topic for another essay, but suffice it here to point out that its role is not insignificant.) 

It is a challenging thing to draw away from the culture of which one is a product, to refuse to capitulate to the almost fatalistic declaration, “They don’t make them like they used to.” By this we often mean, “Greatness of mind, power of prose, magnanimity of soul, these things do not appear in people as often as they once did.” Who is blamed for this development is dependent upon the speaker: history, culture, society, the educational system, individuals themselves. For my part, I would propose that the cause may be attributed to any number of factors—strict causality being too overly simplistic to define such a broad problem. Whatever the factors at work, however, the fact remains: Our literacy has been poorly safeguarded, poorly cultivated, and poorly used. And I do not remove myself from this criticism. I too have not employed or refined my own literacy as I ought, reading far less than I should and writing far more slap-shoddenly than I could, satisfied with mediocrity where mastery was offered. 

The problem is broad, but the solution may be simple: intentional individual practice. Practice has become a rather dull word, I admit, with its connotations of monotonous repetition and bland exercises performed ad infinitum, until you can picture your task—be it playing the piano or reciting Latin conjugations—with agonizing clarity even in your sleep. But this needn’t be the case, and the intentionality behind intentional practice ought to be sufficient to overcome too much dullness (though dullness is, even when practicing the most delightful of things, to be occasionally expected; that is the time for discipline, not inspiration). Intentionality suggests a constant increase in the challenge of the thing being practiced. A pianist does not practice her scales forever, nor the child his conjugations; at a certain point these foundational skills become ingrained and are replaced with greater challenges. This too ought to be the case for our literacy. Our starting point may be the simple act of habituating daily reading or of writing for pleasure. These small undertakings lay the foundation for subsequent challenges: reading a book “above” our current level of comfort, for example—a classic novel, or an interesting work of non-fiction—or writing, not for merely for pleasure, but to communicate a particular idea to a particular audience. From there the challenges may escalate: to familiarize oneself with the great works of enlightenment philosophy, to read all of Jane Austen, to write an articles for publication, or to begin a book. The exact manner of intentional practice is flexible, but its goal should remain that of enhancing one’s literacy: to deepen their reading, master the craft of writing, and polish the rare tools of logic and argumentation. These are powerful and priceless skills, and these are the skills we each have in our own power to resurrect. 

This brings me back to the All Souls examination questions—my own mind- and prose-enhancing challenge. I possess, if the previous paragraphs have proven anything, some basic capacity to string words together into coherent sentences, and coherent sentences into compete paragraphs. They may even prove that I have acquired a unique style which is inspired and influenced by the authors with whom I have spent the most time, who have, as a result, left their thumbprints upon my prose. This is merely a foundation—a strong foundation, granted—but one upon which it is now given to me to build, with the recognition that I have, more than any other generation that has preceded me, both the opportunity—and, dare I say, the obligation—to stand upon the shoulders of giants. Thus, I am dedicated to picking up my technological pen (and perhaps a real pen too) to enjoy the challenge of cultivating my own powers of reading, writing, and intellect by challenging the essay questions that have tested many of Oxford’s greatest minds. Mediocrity, after all, need not be sufficient and it need not be final.