Mr. Rector,
Dear Professors,
Honourable Honorary Doctors,
dear Doctors and Masters,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

On behalf of all Honorary Doctors who have just received their degrees, I thank the University of Lapland for the honour bestowed upon us. Our common gratitude belongs to the Charitable Mother of Lapland, the Alma Mater, the university that has bestowed the burden of honour on our shoulders and thus recognised us as its members.

We all feel a sincere gratitude - those who have, with compasses and an angle iron, built the huge cathedral of science, and those who have followed a more lonely path, apart from the academic family, and contributed to this noble building through their intuition with art or the written word, with faith or music. I see no difference here. Should we still wish to identify the difference, we could see that it is no bigger than the difference between the left and the right hemisphere of the brain. And if today, we rose high enough to embrace with human endeavours the farthest horizons stretching into the azure skies, we would see the beginning of all things: we could see science and art leaning on each other for support, and walking hand in hand. This has been so since Life, the Life that we only later were to call Man, developed the need to measure out time and space in order to carry them along in memory and make more efficient use of them. Those who succeeded in doing so today speak with our voices. Those who did not are silent. And yet we should learn to understand their silence, for this silence contains a warning. Who would teach us to learn? Who would teach the teacher?

This is the pivotal question of our time. I was born in a Hanseatic city and am familiar with its customs: first you are an apprentice, then a journeyman, then come the wandering years, and finally the master's certificate. "Wem Gott will die rechte Gunst erweisen, den schickt er in die weite Welt," a central European folk song says - God sends wandering the people upon whom he wants to bestow his greatest grace. I have done my own wanderings, sometimes even sitting down. Once, it happened on a walrus hunting trip in an Eskimo boat, when a man told me: "You'd better sit over there!" Later I thought of the words he left unsaid, as they were unnecessary: "if you want to stay alive". Another time I was offered a seat in Princetown on a lovely green lawn, with the words: "Professor Einstein used to love this chair." I have neither before nor later ever heard anybody call Albert Einstein a professor and for a moment I could feel his presence there. These two seats have remained equally important in my memory - if you permit me such a deeply personal confession.

In Estonia, we have thought a lot of how to speed up learning and to catch up with the free world. We decided to connect all the Estonian schools to the World Wide Web and called this challenge by the somewhat American name of "tiger leap". The day before yesterday I read in a newspaper that little Estonia had the greatest number of web links in Central Europe and had left even many Western European countries behind. But allow me to pose the question: if all tigers leap, will the tiger leap? Man has always longed for the crystal ball that he could carry in his pocket. In old times, people went to Jerusalem or Mecca to find the truth, now the truth comes to us, but life is no easier: we have gained time, but lose it again to the obligation to make a choice. The choice is indeed ours. Thus we have, as if bargaining on an ancient bazaar, exchanged time for freedom of choice, for democracy, but is this a fair deal? Is it we who are choosing, or is someone somewhere making the choice for us, leaving us just the illusion of freedom? Who chooses the texts, who cuts the videotapes, who edits them, who is beating the drum? Are we moving back towards the beginning, to the time when the beat of the drum, the rhythm was measuring space and time? Is the shaman's drum still in our hands? And if not, who is holding it now?

Ladies and Gentlemen:

learning is simple and sometimes even dangerous. To learn to learn is the supreme commandment of the closing century and the new millennium.

Today, by conferring to us this honorary degree, you have assumed responsibility for us and extended to us a certificate bestowing duties upon us. For this I want to thank all of you.

I hope it would not be too trivial to conclude my speech with the words: Vivat, crescat, floreat, academia Lapponiensis!

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