A boy steals pears from a neighbor's tree, not from hunger but for the sheer thrill of the theft, and from that small act of pointless transgression an entire theology of desire unfolds. Written around the year 400, Augustine's Confessions invented the genre of autobiography by turning the soul inside out before God. The bishop of Hippo traces his restless youth through Carthage, Rome, and Milan, through Manichean heresy and carnal obsession, toward the garden in Milan where a child's voice commands him to take up and read. The prose is simultaneously prayer and philosophy, intimate and cosmic. What Augustine discovered is that memory itself is a vast palace, and that God had been waiting inside it all along.