This are some fragments from August Strindberg's A Dream Play that caught my attention.
I have seen two wonderful adaptations of this play, first by Alejandro Jodorowsky and then by the theatre group from the University of Melbourne, so I decided it was time to read the book and see where these two plays, so different in form, took their essence from.
In the play, the Daughter of Indra descends to Earth to witness human life and report back to the Gods why there is so much suffering, after experiencing human life herself.
I don't know if the fragments make any sense by themselves, away from the total context of the play, but I hope you can see some meaning between this wonderful lines about love, life and human condition.
Daughter: Who is miss Victoria?
Doorkeeper: She is his love.
Daughter: A true answer. What she is to us or others doesn’t matter to him. Only what she is to him, that’s what she is.
Officer: Here’s the Billsticker with his net. How was the fishing?
Billsticker: not too bad. The summer was hot and a bit long…the net was alright, but not quite what I had in mind.
Officer: “Not quite what I had in mind.” Excellently put. Nothing ever is as one imagined it-because one’s mind goes further than the act, goes beyond the object.
Officer: (when they are about to open the misterious door) Oh God, what a fuss there is whenever one wants to do anything new and great! Well-we shall take proceedings…To the lawyer then, and we will see if the law holds good. To the lawyer!
Lawyer: A sighing…a moaning…a wailing.
Daughter: The lamentation of mortals has reached so far, no further. But why this endless lamentation? Is there no joy in life?
Lawyer: Yes. The sweetest which is also the bitterest-love! Marriage and a home. The highest and the lowest.
Lawyer: Alas for us then! But let us prevent hatred. I promise never to mention untidiness again, although it is torture to me.
Daughter: And I will eat cabbage, although that is torment to me.
Lawyer: And so-life together is a torment. One’s pleasure is the other’s pain.
Daughter: Human beings are pitiful.
Officer: Of course I know. But I so often forget what I know.
Q.Master: And I so often wish I could forget-especially myself. That’s why I go in for masquerades, fancy dress, theatricals.
Officer: Why. What’s the matter with you?
Q.Master: If I talk, they say I’m bragging. If I hold my tongue they call me a hypocrite.
Q.Master: You don’t have to do anything in order to meet with life’s little discomforts.
She: How brief are joy and happiness!
Husband, to Wife: My happiness is so complete that I wish to die.
Wife: But why to die?
Husband: In the midst of happiness grows a seed of unhappiness. Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peal.
Wife: Let us die together, now at once.
Husband: Die! Yes, let us die. For I fear happiness, the deceiver.
Daughter: …So duty is altogether unpleasant. What then can one enjoy?
Lawyer: What one enjoys is sin.
Daughter: Sin?
Lawyer: Which is punished. Yes. If I enjoy myself one day, one evening, the next day I have a bad conscience and go through the torments of hell.
Daughter: How strange!
Lawyer: I wake in the morning with a headache, and then the repetition begins, but it is a distorted repetition, so that everything which was charming and witty and beautiful the night before appears in memory ugly, stupid, repulsive. Pleasure stinks, and enjoyment falls to pieces. What people call success is always a step towards the next failure. The successes in my life have been my downfall. Men have an instinctive dread of another’s good fortune. They feel it’s unjust that fate shoud favour any one man, so try to restore the balance by rolling boulders across his path. To have talent is to be in danger of one’s life-one may so easily starve to death…
Daughter: What does he mean by my “gains”?
Poet: Probably nothing at all. That’s what we call idle chatter. He was just chattering.
Daughter: But that hurt me more than anything else.
Poet: That’s why he said it. Human beings are like that.
Daughter: …But this yearning for suffering comes into conflict with the longing for joy, for love. Now you understand what love is; supreme joy in the greatest suffering, the sweetest is the most bitter. Do you understand now what woman is? Woman, through whom sin and death entered into life.
“Why with anguish are you born?
Why do you hurt your mother so,
Child of man, when bringing her
the joy of motherhood,
joy beyond all other joys?
Why wake to life,
why greet the light
with a cry of fury and of pain,
Child of man, when to be glad
should be the gift of life?
Why are we born like animals?
We who stem from God and man,
whose souls are longing to be clothed
in other than this blood and filth.
Must God’s own image cut its teeth?”
