Confessions (Outler translation)

Written in his forty-third year, this is the work that invented autobiography itself. Augustine of Hippo looks back on his life with unflinching honesty: the hedonistic youth, the years spent in intellectual pursuit of truth through Manichaeism, the passionate affair that produced a son, the teaching career in Milan. But the Confessions is far more than memoir. It is a philosophical investigation of memory, time, and the nature of the self. Augustine asks how we can be certain of anything when our own minds deceive us, why we sin knowing it will harm us, and what exactly we mean when we say we want to be happy. His famous conversion in a Milanese garden, hearing a child's voice sing "take and read," is merely the dramatic center of a life-long struggle between flesh and spirit. This is for anyone who has ever wondered who they really are.