Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Benedict Torvalds Read Free Book Online

how things work, and make them seem more complicated than they really are. But it just wasn’t that interesting and I wasn’t a very good leader. I certainly wasn’t good at giving orders. I took them well—the trick is not to take it personally—but I didn’t feel that it was my mission in life to do the best job.
    Not then.
    Did I mention how cold it gets in Lapland?
    Come to think of it, I really hated it while I was there. But it was one of those things: After it was over it immediately became a wonderful experience.
    It also gave me something to discuss with virtually any Finnish male for the rest of my life. In fact, some people suggest that the major reason for the required army duty is to give Finnish men something to talk about over beer for as long as they live. They all have something miserable in common. They hated the Army, but they’re happy to talk about it afterward.

VII
    While we’re on the subject, let me tell you some more about Finland. We probably have more reindeer than any place on Earth. We also have a healthy share of both alcoholics and fans of tango dancing. Spend a winter in Finland and you understand the roots of all the drinking. There’s no excuse for the tangoistas, but, thankfully, they are all pretty much concentrated in small towns, where you never have to encounter them.
    A recent survey determined that Finnish males are the most virile in Europe. It must be all the reindeer meat, or the hours spent in saunas. This is a nation that literally is home to more saunas than cars. Nobody actually knows how this religion started, but the tradition, at least in some places, is to build the sauna first, then the house. Many apartment buildings contain a sauna on the first-floor level or the top floor, and every family gets its own private hour—like Thursdays, 7 to 8 P.M. (Thursdays and Fridays tend to be sauna days.) That way, you don’t have to endure the horror of seeing your neighbors naked. I was once thumbing through an English-language guidebook to Finland that went to great lengths to warn the reader that Finns never have sex in saunas, and how they would be horrified to learn that such a violation has taken place or was even a mere fantasy in the tourist’s mind. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read that, because the sauna is such a neutral place in the Finnish home that the book might just as appropriately have warned against having sex on the kitchen floor. I don’t think it’s any big deal. In remote locales babies are born in saunas—the only places with hot water—and that’s where you go to die, according to some traditions. These rules don’t apply to my family, by the way, which has a laid-back approach to the whole thing.
    There are other traits that distinguish Finns from other members of the human species. For example, there’s this silence tradition. Nobody talks much. They just sort of stand around not saying anything. This is another rule that doesn’t apply to my family, which I will generously describe as “offbeat.”
    Finns are stoic to a fault. Silent suffering and fierce determination might be what helped us survive in the face of domination by Russia, a succession of bloody wars, and weather that sucks. But these days, it just seems odd. The German writer Bertolt Brecht lived briefly in Finland during World War II and made the famous observation about patrons of a railway station café there “remaining silent in two languages.” He left for the United States via Vladivostock the first chance he could.
    Even today, if you step into a bar in any Finnish city—particularly the smaller ones—you’re likely to find stone-faced men sitting by themselves, staring off into the air. People respect each other’s privacy in Finland—that’s another big thing—so nobody would think of going up to a stranger and striking up a conversation. There’s a conundrum. Finns actually are quite friendly. But few people are ever able to find that out.
    I