Valerie Fox is reading Augustine's Confessions
(translated by William Watts, Harvard, 1912).
Everyone knows that it just takes one big break to make it in the movie business. I'm hoping mine occurs with the sale or production of my screenplay about Augustine's life, loosely based on Confessions. I change the time and place to make it more accessible to an audience today. Instead of 4th Century northern Africa, my rendition takes place in Antebellum New Orleans. Instead of being a Christian in a pagan world, my Monica (Augustine's mother) is a German Lutheran, married to a Catholic slave-owner. In answer to his mother's prayers, the real Augustine gave up the world of law and rhetoric, not to mention his lover and their child, in favor of the life of the church; my Augustine doesn't become a churchman, rather, he becomes a charismatic media mogul. And so on. Many themes in the Confessions are timeless after all: jealousy, friendship, and falling in love with inappropriate people. Oh yes, and conversion.
Known as one of the earliest autobiographies, the Confessions offer strangeness and insight. I'm always bowled over by the curiously minute self-awareness that tinges Augustine's descriptions of infancy and beyond. His attachment—somewhat unnaturally close—to his mother Monica, his abandonment of his lover and their child, and his eventual conversion to Christianity all seem written with honest detachment. There's an awareness here of the importance of childhood to a person's developing personality. At least that's how many readers in today's memoir-crazed, analysis-friendly reading public surely take it.
The best parts, to me, are included in the first half (books 1-8), where Augustine sets forth his shortcomings and this in turn highlights the greatness of God for rescuing the man from himself.
This time I'm especially noticing the parts about his infancy. Here's an example from book 1 on the sins of infancy: Wherein did I then sin? In that I cried to fiercely after the pap? For if I should do so at these years, crying...I should be laughed at and reprehended for it. And a little later in the same passage: I myself have seen and observed a little baby to be already jealous; and before it could speak, what an angry and bitter look it would cast at another child that sucked away its milk from it.
Another great weakness of the saint turns up in young adulthood, when he loved the "miserable madness" elicited in him by his attendance of plays.
I have to confess also that I just like the feel of my Loeb Classical Library books. Many of you know these tiny books. Red for Latin. Green for Greek. They feel soft and light. They are great for balancing oneself when climbing stairs. Maybe I'm the only person still reading this translation, but I'm not willing to give up the feel of the book.
This originally appeared in the "What I'm Reading" section of The Drexel Online Journal.
Copyright © Valerie Fox 2007 - 2011