August Strindberg - Inferno

Bearer of a fascinating enigma.
In disorder, a freedom.
"August Strindberg [1849-1912, Swedish writer and playwright] arrived at Inferno collecting inexplicable signs that disturbed him in Paris, Saxony, and Lund, with them laying siege to the trivialities of everyday life. He exhausted himself in a splendidly failed effort to confront his doubts with the tranquil innocence of reality. But he constructed a show that impresses. His manipulation of ephemeral signs harshly marks a destiny supposedly governed by Powers that spare him neither pain nor the martyrdom of expiation. For Strindberg, these Powers—an image of a god he cannot define—incite him to take refuge in Science, but ironically he will find there another scourge that incites him to attack men; It is a world of obsessions, with rare and short truces, defeats suffered with a masochism that humiliates and destines it to the bloody disaster of human relations.»
From the presentation by Aníbal Fernandes

«Hell? I was raised in the deepest contempt for hell, taught to see it as a fantasy thrown into the rubbish heap of prejudices. Despite this, I cannot deny a difference, and therein lies the novelty of the interpretation of so-called eternal punishments: we are already in hell. The earth is hell, a prison that a superior intelligence built so that I could not take a step without pinching the happiness of others, and others could not be happy without making me suffer. […]
The fire of hell is the desire for success; the Powers awaken it and allow the damned to see their wishes fulfilled. But once the goal is achieved and the desires realized, everything is revealed to be devoid of value and the victory is null! It is all vanity of vanities, nothing more than vanity. After the first disappointment, the Powers fan the flames of desire, of ambition; but what torments most is not the insatiable appetite; it is, rather, the satisfied greed that inspires disgust for everything. The Devil, too, suffers infinitely because he obtains what he desires the instant he desires it, and has nothing more to enjoy.

August Strindberg, "Inferno"