Stranger monologue (Act 5) — Plays by August Strindberg, Third Series

Exactly! It's the same everywhere. In your youth you see the web set up. Parents, relatives, comrades, acquaintances, servants form the warp. Later on in life the weft becomes visible. And then the shuttle of fate runs back and forth with the thread--sometimes it breaks, but is tied up again, and it goes on as before. The reed clicks, the thread is packed together into curlicues, and one day the web lies ready. In old age, when the eye has learned how to see, you discover that those curlicues form a pattern, a monogram, an ornament, a hieroglyph, which only then can be interpreted: that's life! The world-weaver has woven it! [_Pause; he rises_] Over there, in that scrap-heap, I notice the family album. [_He walks a few steps to the right and picks up a photograph album_] That's the book of our family fate. Grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, brothers and sisters, relatives, acquaintances--or so-called "friends"--schoolmates, servants, godparents. And, strange to say, wherever I have gone, in America or Australia, to Hongkong or the Congo, everywhere I found at least one countryman, and as we began to dig it always came out that this man knew my family, or at least some godfather or maid servant--that, in a word, we had some common acquaintances. I even found a relative in the island of Formosa----