He wrote it in his forties, about four years into being a bishop, and he did not address it to a reader. Every line of the Confessions is spoken to God in the second person, which means you are over the writer's shoulder listening to a man tell somebody else the truth about himself. That is why it still works. There is no audience to manage and no reputation being built, and what comes out of it is the first book in the West in which a person is examined from the inside.The scene everyone knows is a theft of pears. He was sixteen, the fruit was not good, he was not hungry, he threw most of it to the pigs, and he spends the better part of a book asking why he did it. The answer he arrives at, that he loved the wrongdoing itself and loved having company in it, is more honest about being sixteen than most of what has been written on the subject since.Around that sits a career: rhetoric at Carthage and Rome and Milan, nine years inside a sect he later judged a fraud, a woman he lived with for years and never once names and the son they had together, a mother who followed him across the Mediterranean and would not be shaken off, and a bishop in Milan he went to hear as a professional listening to a rival and stayed for other reasons. Then a garden, a child's voice on the far side of a wall, a book picked up and opened at random, and the argument stops. His mother dies at Ostia a book later, and the conversation the two of them had at a window a few days before is one of the passages every other page in the tradition gets measured against.Four books come after the life ends, and they are why this is philosophy and not a memoir. Book X takes memory apart and asks what it means that a man can go looking for himself and not find himself. Book XI asks what time is and gives the answer that has been quoted for sixteen hundred years: he knows perfectly well until somebody asks him. The last two read the opening of Genesis line by line. Editors have been cutting them for centuries. They are here entire, because the book he wrote has thirteen books in it.This is the Civil Savage Society edition of Edward Bouverie Pusey's translation of 1838, made for the Library of the Fathers at Oxford and still the most quoted English version of the work, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 268 pages. All thirteen books entire, Pusey's own argument restored at the head of each one from the printed editions that carry them, and his closing colophon. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the modern introductions that tell you what to think before you have read a line.Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
