ABSTRACT
My paperback copy of Rex Warner’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, which I first read in 1964, is so tattered that I carry it around in a cut-to-fit box. When I open it a small shower of confetti, from its dry and brittle pages, litters the floor. Over the last forty-five years, I have re-read St. Augustine’s Confessions every few years, in English and in Latin, astonished that reading the same text, having new experience and questions, made a different text pop into my eyes. Each time I read it I notice themes, preoccupations and habits of mind – Augustine’s and my own – that I had not noticed before.
