Good morning, one thousand seven hundred and eighteen graduates! Sometimes it's fairly good being a small country, and sometimes it has its drawbacks. If there happens to be a rain cloud above the small palace of a small country's president, I am not so sure if there had been enough room for all of us in that small building. But fortunately there is no rain and probably you have already been caressed by the sun.

Today is a sunny day for you anyway. You know it is there beyond the clouds anyway. And this knowledge -- that the sun stays with us even when we don't see it, while beyond the clouds -- is one so awfully simple that it was known even to a stone age hunter. But on the other hand this knowledge must always come back to you on what is somewhat pathetically called one's path of life.

Curiously enough, this simplest thing tends to go away when you begin to be beset with the difficulties of the first years of your life and when all you see above you is rain clouds, forgetting that behind them is the same tranquil sun wending its way for billions of years already. This said, I have virtually said all there is for me to tell you.

I am two or three times as old as you are. I remember in 1947, when your parents were young, I happened to drop in at the Pikk Street second-hand bookshop and, curiously enough, they still had for sale there a history of Tartu University by Georg von Rauch, published at Greifswald in 1942, covering on its 600 pages the Carolina period. I read it, but as I said I think I was a bit younger at that time than you are now and it was a bit difficult for me to picture 17th century research, those young people engaged in sciences. I could picture the goose quill, maybe also the ink and the sand used to dry the ink at the time there was yet no blotting paper. Maybe I could also picture gowns, but it was not so very easy for me to picture that learning, writing master's theses and the rest of it.

Today, in 1996, as I think back to my own salad days, to the anger that I was always overcome with when in May and June I had to sit over my books and outside the sun was shining, and as I also think back to the sciences and attainments, then right this morning, as I was thinking what I should tell you if it rained and what I should tell you if it did not, it suddenly dawned upon me that now it was very easy for me to picture those young men of Academia Carolina, since there had been no difference between me and them. And, curiously enough, there is no difference between your youth and my very distant youth either.

You all have cursed at times why this or that in particular should be studied. It's superfluous, there's so little time, there are more important things to learn. It's been included in your programme for the sake of formality, you have no interest in it, you simply learn it out of a sense of duty. It's a feeling familiar to all of us. It was also familiar to those men, who at that time had to do the compulsory learning of Greek and Latin to boot; it was familiar to me as well.

Let me give you this simple example. In the years 1947-49 an astronomer/cosmologist named Fred Hoyle was active and working in England, who discovered the red shift, or to put it more simply, the expansion of the universe. And since this was in stark conflict with the perception of the world, or the world outlook, imposed by the then Soviet dictatorship, it was absolutely banned here.

I listened to his lectures, hearing his voice twice a week as he was delivering his lectures over the radio, and curiously enough I took notes. Yes, I took notes, since I was in two minds for a long time whether I should go to read astronomy or law.

Law was not attractive in my eyes, since by that time it had already been harnessed to the old barrow we call the Soviet regime. But the indecision between astronomy or history, which was the nearest to the state, lingered on inside me, and I studiously took notes of Fred Hoyle, and I'm still keeping the notes.

Superfluous, totally superfluous. Until one evening Secretary-General Solana of NATO was sitting here and I had to give him a toast. So I told him, look, Mr Secretary-General, just as Fred Hoyle's universe, which is constantly expanding, politics also knows only tendencies. And we have to choose between whether it's the universe of democracy that begins to expand, or it's the universe of totalitarianism with all those redshifts that Fred Hoyle so nicely wrote about.

Of course I didn't know, although I ought to have known, that Secretary-General Solana's master's thesis had been on Fred Hoyle. He got on his feet right there, over his plate of soup, with a very strange look in his eyes, and reciprocated with a wonderful speech, a deeply affected speech. And now I know there is nothing in the world man learns that goes to no purpose.

Great academic knowledge, but not so much even great academic knowledge as an ability to apply the acquired knowledge at the right place and the right moment, is what I wish you with all my heart at this outset of your careers. If you cope with that, you will go a long way, a lot farther than this little building. And always come back to Estonia! The best of luck!

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