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

[Stoops _over the scrap-heap and begins to poke in the books piled there_] Those are the student's books--Same kind of rot as in my youth--Livy's Roman history, which is said to be lies, every word--But here's a volume out of my brother's library--"Columbus, or the Discovery of America"! My own book, which I got as a Christmas gift in 1857. My name has been erased. This means it was stolen from me--and I accused one of our maids, who was discharged on that account! Fine business! Perhaps it led to her ruin--fifty years ago! Here is the frame of one of our family portraits; my renowned grandfather, the smuggler, who was put in the pillory--fine!--But what is this? The foot-piece of a mahogany bed--the one in which I was born! Oh, damn!--Next item: a leg of a dinner-table--the one that was an heirloom. Why, it was supposed to be of ebony, and was admired on that account! And now, after fifty years, I discover it to be made of painted maple. Everything had its colours changed in our house to render it unrecognisable, even the clothes of us children, so that our bodies always were stained with various dyes. Ebony--humbug! And here's the dining-room clock--smuggled goods, that, too--which has measured out the time for two generations. It was wound up every Saturday, when we had salt codfish and a posset made with beer for dinner. Like all intelligent clocks, it used to stop when anybody died, but when I died it went on just as before. Let me have a look at you, old friend--I want to see your insides. [_As he touches the clock it falls to pieces_] Can't stand being handled! Nothing could stand being handled in our home--nothing! Vanity, vanity!--But there's the globe that was on top of the clock, although it ought to have been at the bottom. You tiny earth: you, the densest and the heaviest of all the planets--that's what makes everything on you so heavy--so heavy to breathe, so heavy to carry. The cross is your symbol, but it might just as well have been a fool's cap or a strait-jacket--you world of delusions and deluded!--Eternal One--perchance Thy earth has gone astray in the limitless void? And what set it whirling so that Thy children were made dizzy, and lost their reason, and became incapable of seeing what really is instead of what only seems?--Amen!--And here is the student!