In the last year of my upper secondary school, my art teacher asked me what I wanted to do after school. I said that I would try to get into the Ateneum Art Museum. ‘You won’t get in there,’ my teacher said encouragingly. After my mother told me once when I was a child that my planned career of being a professional skier did not pay, I decided to try to study art and sport in addition to the third subject in my school-leaving certificate – the Finnish language.

It quickly became clear when I could not pass tests on the Mordovians, the Mari, the main Finnish dialects and phonology that I was in the wrong place at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies. The historical linguistics department was, however, the right place because I found alternative subjects of interest. Among them were some unnecessary subjects which I banged my head against for about seven years, such as aesthetics, philosophy, theatre studies and Finnish literature. I got a bachelor’s degree in Finnish, Finnish Literature and Comparative Literature, with minors in Journalism and Sociology.

In my journalism studies I learned that the head of the department, Osmo A. Wiio, could read two columns in a newspaper simultaneously and that he never took notes in his student days because he had such a great memory. I decided to follow in the footsteps of a genius, so I never took any notes and I never learned a thing. In my sociology studies, I learned that there were absurdly good-looking girls in the Franzenia building and that Erik Allardt was the smartest teacher I had met so far. In my Finnish language studies, the most fun I had was in Lecturer Maria Vilkuna’s syntax class when she imagined going into the kitchen and asking the eggs if any of them were boiling yet. In the same course I remember the future author Kari Hotakainen waking me up by shooting spit balls made from the tin foil in a cigarette pack onto the back of my neck. He had written jokes on the insides of them.

The first of my lovely children was born in 1985 and it tore me out of the university before getting at least something tangible, such as a bachelor’s degree before the university reform and before my old studies got even older. Because of this, my potentially pioneering Master’s thesis on Pentti Saarikoski’s prose works remained incomplete, as well as my research on why almost all of Graham Greene’s novels end with the main character dying and why readers are told this in advance.

In all seriousness, I made the most important humanist discoveries at the pub, and I don’t just mean the girls. On this endless pub crawl that started in the Vanha Bar in 1979, I have heard the most important presentations and met the most interesting spontaneous thinkers.

The benefit of my time at the university was that I was forced to read the classics of Finnish and world literature, and these surely got stuck in my mind and body. In those stories there is always a smaller, poorer and oppressed side, which may be the core of humanism.