Ms Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen,

If we trace Life from its most primitive form to the most complex one, we may sum up the development of life in three surprisingly simple and pure words. The words have been and are: LEARN TO LEARN.

Doubts have been expressed of late about the endurance of culture. There are talks about book culture being overridden by computer culture, about a "hypertextual revolution", about the accumulation of texts in the computer memory where they can be deleted or changed any moment. But this is the way culture and its carrier - memory - always have functioned.

One or two decades ago my one-time teacher and ever since my good friend Academician Matti Kuusi launched one of his typical paradoxes which has even become the title of a book. This word pair is "unwritten literature". Unwritten literature has effectively functioned slightly over three million years, if Man is roughly defined as I have tried to do it proceeding from Leakey. I am one of the few lucky ones who have been able to observe the unwritten literature of a Siberian tribe of hunters and fishers in a genuine neolithic scenery: the expanse of the ritual amounted to about fifty Iliad volumes. That verbal experience was stored in human memory, as it used to be before the Gutenberg galaxy. Explorers of last century, including the Pole Pekarski, who had been deported to Siberia, have estimated, on the basis of the Yakut oloncho (national epic), that the storage capacity of Man is between seventy and a hundred Iliad volumes. As you will have understood, I am using Iliad as a unit of measurement, something like a hectolitre. What do I mean? Just that in the remote neolithic past Man has, in the name of his survival, gone through a revolution which for its gravity and tensity is quite comparable to the current Automatic Information Processing revolution, the AIP revolution. I will not enter into ethnology, as you have no more than three days for holding your congress. I only want to say that the prospects for preserving Life depend on the prospects for storing Memory effectively in order to learn effectively. The French Jesuit Theillar de Chardin, who is very close to me, has indeed treated the Humankind's collective, intertwined and mysteriously autonomous memory as God. I am also constrained to bypass this in fact central question and will confine myself to the assertion that memory, or experience, is Life. For a long time the human experience had used the Human brain as a shelter where it could multiply and improve. For the past five centuries we have carried our memory outside the brain, kept it on the bookshelf, which is nice and neat but has become oldfashioned and cumbersome, especially when borrowed books are not returned. Now we are standing in the midst of another change, which in his time was somewhat superficially predicted by McLuhan, and as is usual for periods of change, we are gnawed at by doubts. It cannot possibly be otherwise. The path of Life is bound to be one of doubts and surmounting them. The sceptics suppose that our electronic era will lead to the standardization of culture, consequently of Man. This is erroneous, hence it is human. Memory is life, and to store memory effectively and to make it accessible to others means, at the same time, a higher effectiveness and accessibility of life. The force of life, unlike technology, rather depends on variety than on standardization. The non-standard, or the exceptional, actually is the most valuable part of life and culture. Paradoxically, it is the non-standard that is the fastest to become the standard.

Thus I draw equals signs between between Life, Memory and Culture. Learning is nothing but the securing of life and man.
So, let us learn to learn. Over the times, across the distances. Together, by nations and continents. Then the contours our attractive traits will be outlined and then we shall realize it is those traits that hold us together stronger than any political declarations. This is in harmony with the essence of Life and Man, with Life's perpetuity.

With these optimistic words I wish the EDEN conference the best of success, and I hope that Estonia is not east of EDEN, that is east of Eden, to turn a gracious somersault towards John Steinbeck.

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