"Why the heck not?” It’s a good attitude, I think. It’s the attitude that led me to write my first novel, to learn flamenco dancing, calligraphy, and natural history, and was the reason why I spent twelve near-consecutive hours at the end of September in a huge silent library with some of the world’s most brilliant minds, being stared at by marble statues. It was during final year when I resolved to take the All Souls Fellowship exam, and it was in the heady days of summer, still on the First high, when I officially signed up. It’ll be a bit Matthew Clairmont-esque, I thought (any Discovery of Witches fans out there?). I spent the evening before the first exam in the Eagle and Child hoping I’d soak up some cognitive power from the ghosts of old Inklings, happily eating sticky toffee pudding by the fire and re-visiting my finals notes. This, despite having packed them away in July, deliriously happy that I’d never have to see them again. Hmm. Now, I didn’t take the exam with any hope, expectation, or even a frantically strong desire to be elected. The odds of being the one student to be given the world’s most prestigious academic position, in a group of candidates where a high First class degree is such a given as to be mundane, were slender. No, I took the exam simply because I thought twelve hours of writing - having just done finals a few weeks prior to signing up - would be top larks. And they were!! I stayed in Keble College and enjoyed two utterly gluttonous breakfasts, spent a couple of days happily paddling around lovely, lovely Oxford, swooshing around in my gown like I’d never left, and gratefully drank several glasses of champagne on the quad after the final paper. I proved that we don’t own our bodies, called for a scorched earth policy in ethics, and explained in great detail why woolly mammoths should not be brought back from the dead. I took the fight to normative ethics, to the problem of induction, to any topic, in fact, that crossed my path. Part of my plan was to be as controversial and obscure as possible in the hope I’d be invited to a viva voce and roundly asked by the fifty or so assembled fellows, “what on Earth is wrong with you?”
The letter I’d been expecting arrived a few weeks later, politely letting me down and reassuring me that many excellent candidates were not successful. Maybe my passionate declaration that philosophers should give up all that silly theorising and might “do well to remember that life has to be lived” was a little too flamboyant. Maybe All Souls is secretly funding mammoth-necromancy experiments. Maybe it was for the best, since I’m loving my masters course and struggle to decide what I want for dinner, let alone what I’d want to research for seven years. C’est la vie, or as I prefer to say, ho hum. Here’s to doing things just for the sake of doing them! In fact - I’m going to do sit the exam again next year, with the expectation that the outcome will be exactly the same!
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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