Dec 27, 2025 5:31 AM
In the sixties, the two artists picked an island and spent the next 30 summers there. Finnish people tend to spend their holidays that way: in an isolated cabin (a mökki) either on an island, in the forest or near a lake (there are 1,8 million mökkis in this 5,5 million-people country).
Pietilä illustrates in black and white aquarelles.
The island is inhospitable, and the building permit is hard to get, so they start building before winter and before an answer from authorities, with the help of a taciturn pirate of the Archipelago Sea.
So this is a journal of the building, the living and the leaving of the reluctant island.
At the end of her notebook Ham wrote. underlined “We must not gild the lily.” Yes, yes, I know, probably from the Bible. And I know exactly what she meant - that we’ve tried to make the meadow into a garden, change the thicket into a park, tame the shore with a dock, and all the other things we’ve undeniably done wrong.
Okay, we make mistakes. What of it? Sometimes it felt like unrequited love - everything exaggerated. I had the feeling that this immoderately pampered and badly treated island was a living thing that didn’t like us, or felt sorry for us, depending on the way we behaved, or just because.
Like most hermits' tales, it's about contemplating nature (the cat, the damn seagulls, the other birds, the fish) and noticing there is no end to contemplation, being content with making do, and accepting that, boredom included, everything is right the way it is.
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