ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an autoethnography about how I met Zygmunt Bauman, got an experience of symbolist movement, and began to get a glimmer of critical pragmatism. On Sunday November 25, 2012, in Helsinki, Finland, I attended the first ever international exhibition of symbolist landscape paintings, called “52 Souls” at the Ateneum Art Museum in the Finnish National Gallery. The Nordic countries were well represented, as were the usual suspects – France, Spain, the UK, The Netherlands, and Whistler from the US. I had attended a lecture by Zygmunt Bauman on Thursday November 22, and managed to secure an invitation to dinner with him, organized by the faculty of the Helsinki Arts University. As I sat between two art historians I asked them about the symbolist movement and learned, to my surprise, about the exhibition that was then on in Helsinki.
