[Subsection]

After this Myyriäinen did not touch his chisel or his knife again. He padded about quietly in his room, and his mother could only think that he was at work as usual. But now it was a different sort of work he had undertaken. It consisted for the most part in saying good-bye, in cutting small and delicate umbilical cords. He stored things away. He put everything in order. He himself was surprised to see how much there was to clean up after all these years---notes, half-finished sketches, half-erased memories, abandoned projects. But gradually it all got straightened out. The room grew neater every day that passed, and finally it stood spick and span, as if readied for a party. The tools had been left on the bench, but he had polished them, and rejoiced in seeing them lie side by side in perfect order. There is a gentle sadness about such tools.

There was something sad in his whole relationship to the   [p. 16]   room. He had a sense of piety for what it contained. It seemed as though it had belonged to someone who was dead. He treated each object with gentle care. Nothing would be left to look after itself. He took care to see that each object regained the dignity it possesses in itself, when man does not use it carelessly. Painstakingly, he got his "old men" together and put them in a closet, where they could stand without being disturbed or without coming to harm in some other way.

While he poked around in the closet, he came upon a youthful work which he had all but forgotten. It was an early effort, made before he had even received the scanty training which had later come his way on various occasions. He felt a pain in his heart when he saw its head: its features were immortal, however clumsily they had been executed. No matter what: he felt that he must take a good look at this work, hidden long ago, before he locked it into the closet again. He went over to the window in order to examine it. Immediately he saw how inept and technically inferior it was, lacking any real unity or formal balance. But it was expressive just the same; there was something about it which moved him. There was a vision.

The word "Melancholy" had been carved into the base in big, angular letters. He sank into a contemplation of its care-laden features, and from the chaos of its ungainly lines the concept seemed to arise which he had had when the first sketch came into being. He beheld the poet's head in the shadow of melancholy's dark wings: the forehead's mighty vault above the broken lines of the face and the mouth, lines broken by pain, the head bent forward as though to listen to the sad songs and savage ballads of the people. It was like a shell in which the people's heart reverberated as the ocean does. In its loneliness, the land of winter and forests had brought forth this head, and on its forehead there stood   [p. 17]   written: this is my most beloved son. An outsider, perhaps, could see nothing of this in the clumsily carved head, still another reason why he had never shown it to anyone, but rather had left it lying in its place of concealment. But as for himself, he could not behold it again without being overwhelmed by the beauty of the image as he had dreamed it. In some manner, despite everything, the beauty remained, like a hint or a careless notation, and that alone, he thought, was worth more than all the carefully worked-out little figures he had finished later on.

The rhythm of the world's most wondrous cradle-song echoed in his ears. It was melancholy's own song, and it streamed toward him from the poet's forehead:

Grove of death and grove nocturnal!
There's a fine and sandy cradle,
Thither shall I lead my baby.^[1*]

He was seized by an unfathomable tenderness of which he did not know whether it bore death or life in its embrace, whether it sought the last extreme of loneliness or the deepest community. Groping and gentle, his hand passed over this head which he had once begot in a dream, and the memory of the moment of conception swept over him like a hot wave, and he could feel how he had emptied his soul in a mystical union with the primal image he had beheld. He had emptied himself until he reached the boundaries of nothingness and a fullness had filled him unto overflowing. "This is the secret of art," a voice within him said. "This is the secret of love and of death."

Afterwards he would remember this moment as the one in which he for the first time grasped something of the mystery of death.

With a feeling of relief and satisfaction he looked into the closet where he had put his neat little men. But he did not put back the poet's head. He kept it for himself.

Next morning at the rising of the sun he awakened from a dream. He felt that sensation of deep rest which one knows when one has slumbered a while on a soft granite cliff and listened to the sound of the woods and the sea. He took a deep breath, lifted himself up on his elbow, and looked out. He saw that the sun had just risen; it sent its first warm tones of gold into the milky, unreal light of the summer night. It could not have been more than about three o'clock. He lay back again and closed his eyes, drawn to his fleeing dream-world's incomprehensible joy.

He sank into a quiet doze. The dream which had vanished upon his awakening returned, in fragments, only to be erased again in some magic way. A single picture remained, broken loose from a background which had been washed away by the river of forgetfulness; perhaps it was on this account that it exerted such a mysterious attraction, just as a half-solved riddle does. He saw a road which he thought he recognized, although he could not remember where he had seen it, and in the middle of the road there stood a lone and quite extraordinary man. He appeared to be familiar, yet was disturbingly strange. He looked like a tramp; he was dark and had a long stubble, his clothes were dishevelled, and he wore his cap pulled down over his eyes, the way people do in this part of the country. From beneath his closed eyelids, Myyriäinen regarded him with intense interest, and slowly he was filled with the deep joy his dream had given him. Really: the odd thing about the man was that he stood staring at someone who Myyriäinen finally realized had to be himself. "Why are you staring at me that way?" said Myyriäinen. And in the same moment he was wide awake. He realized that it was Jesus. Jesus stood in the   [p. 19]   middle of the road gazing meaningfully at Myyriäinen, who had had no contact with Him or even heard His name mentioned since he was a child. He was not in the least surprised that Jesus looked the way he did, unshaven, seedy, worn out from deprivation and a vagrant's life. It was all the more overwhelming because one knew immediately it was Jesus. "That's how the Son of Man looks," he thought fleetingly.

He closed his eyes and made himself comfortable in the feeling that, for the first time in his life, something supernatural had touched him, like a hand which reaches out and touches one's shoulder. The last thing he saw before he went to sleep again on his granite slab was the look in that raised and ravaged head, which said to him with all the power of its mild and flaming countenance: "Arise and leave all that you have at hand!"