“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”
Oslo“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” is the book’s opening epigraph, attributed to Immanuel Kant. Set immediately before Act One, it offers a compact frame for a drama whose theatrical form, as the introductory direction describes it, moves between shifting times and places, cacophony and stillness, and conversation among characters and with the audience.
Text and Attribution
The expression states that humanity is “crooked timber” from which nothing straight can be made. The script prints the thought across two lines and credits it to Immanuel Kant. Its placement makes the line a threshold to the play rather than dialogue spoken within a scene.
Dramatic Framing
The epigraph’s contrast between crookedness and straightness gives the drama an opening proposition about the limits of human action. The introductory direction calls for acts that gallop as long, unbroken scenes while time and place shift; the epigraph can therefore be read as a frame for a work that presents human affairs without promising a simple, straight course. The text establishes that resonance through placement and wording, without specifying a single interpretation of the events that follow.
