"At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured
being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to
your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too
often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and
exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense
of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The
facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a
pinch.
“Give a brief account of Huss and his work.” Huss? Who was
he and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your
budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag.
You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top- you saw it there the
other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where
is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge- revolutions,
schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss- where is he? You are
amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In desperation
you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a corner is your
man, serenely brooding on his own private thought, unconscious of the
catastrophe which he has brought upon you.
Just then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With
a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go
home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of
professors to ask questions without the consent of the questioned."
-Extract from Chapter 20, The Story of My Life
I like that last line the best :D
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