Confessions

In a garden one night Augustine and a gang of boys strip a neighbour's pear tree bare, not because they are hungry but because the theft is forbidden and that is the whole of the pleasure. He spends pages on it, turning the small crime over and over, because he has understood something no one had written down before: that a person can love wrongdoing for its own sake, with nothing to gain. Confessions is addressed start to finish to God, every sin laid out with terrible exactness, the years with a woman he loved and never named, the prayer that begged for chastity and added, but not yet. To read it is to overhear a mind accounting for itself to the one who already knows. Augustine was the first writer in the West to treat the self as a depth instead of a surface, and every memoir of a soul in crisis since has been written in the room he built. The restlessness of his famous opening never settles. It only moves.