A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Atop my chest, the pitched roof that is the book I fell asleep reading -- Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1867).

In Act Three, Solveig finds Peer in the upper fields, where he is in exile. No sooner does Peer declare his love for Solveig when he is confronted by a troll-witch -- the daughter of the Mountain King -- and the child she bore from their tryst years before. The troll has a declaration of her own, which amounts to a haunting of Peer.

"Repentance?" Peer asks himself. "Why it might take me years/ before I won through! My life would be empty./ To destroy something lovely and holy and fair,/ then patch it together from fragments and shreds.... /You might patch up a fiddle, but never a bell --/ you must never trample the leaf that's to grow."

Peer flees his situation for his mother's house, where he is present for her passing. Act Three ends. We next meet Peer in Act Four. It is many years later and he is living well as a rich man on the south-western coast of Morocco.