[Subsection]

Those monks," Myyriäinen thought, "are great artists, no question about it. They ought to be able to teach a man something about the real nature of art."

Musing, he gazed after the four carts which had disappeared in a cloud of dust, bound in the direction of the village he himself had left a couple of hours before. The monks most likely were going to call on some esteemed fellow-believers in the neighborhood. In the evening they would return to their cloister. It was not very far from here, he knew that much. But it was not a cloister which one visited for amusement's sake. Mindful of the secularization which had taken place in the region's large and more famous brother-house, the abbot here had declared that he wished no guests save those who came for edification and to invoke the aid of the miracle-working Madonna, the cloister's most precious icon. And Myyriäinen knew in his heart that, no matter how much he wanted to strip away his former self, he could not become a pilgrim in spirit and in truth. The holy rites would say nothing to him, and the wonderful hymns would only leave a fleeting impression of beauty.

It bothered him that the little man with the knowing voice who had spoken to him a while ago during the general uproar would not leave him in peace now. Bursting with   [p. 32]   meaning, he stood beneath a birch tree at the very roadside and waved eagerly; there was a handcart a short distance from him. Perhaps he wanted to sell him something. The man's appearance was amusing: he wore drooping trousers and had a cornflower stuck elegantly into the buttonhole of his coat. He had a benign grin all over his face and winked his eyes cunningly; he looked as if he had some trick or other up his sleeve.

Myyriäinen shook his head and decided not to pay the man any attention. He would simply continue his journey, and get rid of him that way. But it went against his grain to leave this place without any further ado: so many strange thoughts had come to him here. He looked ahead with a certain sadness. He could see the little turn-off a few hundred meters along the road; this was where the monks had come from, as far as he could tell. In all likelihood, the turn-off led only to the monks' jetty down at the water's edge. Perhaps some sort of settlement was there, too. But he had no reason to go that way. It led nowhere.

While he stood there in his indecision, trying to keep from looking at the little man and his irritating signals, his thoughts continued to spin their unending thread. Meanwhile, full of attention, the man came forward and introduced himself: "Iivana Lampinen," he said with an extremely well-mannered, almost courtly bow. Without taking the time to wait for an answer, he doused the stranger in a torrent of benign words. It was a fine day under God's heaven, and nice to meet this way on the highway of life, and couldn't he offer the stranger some piroshki and fresh butter, Palaga really had a way with piroshki, and who knows when we'll meet again in the marketplace of life? Myyriäinen gave what he thought might be an appropriate answer, and after repeated promptings and   [p. 33]   friendly shoves he let himself be dragged along to the resting-place beneath the birch tree, where a pile of greasy pastry and a tub of yellow butter could be seen shining from afar. He sat down in the grass and ate heartily and listened with half an ear to Lampinen's good-natured chatter. But his thoughts continued to spin their endless thread undisturbed. . . .

"All the same, it's strange that people have thought up the idea of God. And then they've built these shining temples and richly ornamented cloisters all over the world's surface, and created tones and colors and shapes of incomprehensible beauty in order to express His being. Has man sought a reflection of the divine beauty in his own works? But who can say that beauty is not an illusion? Instead, is it possible that man glorifies himself in this beauty? Why should God be beautiful? He can just as well be hideous, the way the idols of primitive peoples are. He is nothing of all these things which we can imagine. He is that strange, that completely different something which no living person has beheld. Perhaps we conceal it in beauty in order that we may protect ourselves from it. Perhaps those monks are charlatans after all. . . ."