ABSTRACT
When asked to contribute to this volume I chose to write about spiritual memoir and, so, began my reading with the most famous Christian instance of the genre—namely, Saint Augustine’s Confessions (AD 401), a text so foundational that some believe it to be the very first autobiography. At the same time, I was drawn to Jacques Derrida’s 1993 text “Circumfession,” a poetic, philosophical, and very Jewish journey around and about Augustine’s Confessions, a journey shaped by the fact that Derrida, as a child in Algiers, happened to live on a street called rue Saint-Augustin. I also set about reading a range of other spiritual memoirs, diaries, journals, etc. from the intervening centuries. As I did so I became increasingly aware of not only how these various texts interweave but also of how persistent is the metaphor of the road. This prompted thoughts of, arguably, the darkest road of all—namely, the road, or rail-road, to death at Auschwitz, a road taken by those of course who never had the opportunity to record what God may, or may not, have finally meant to them at the very end. Just one of the many who endured this fate was Edith Stein, the Jewish-German philosopher and Catholic convert who became a Discalced Carmelite nun; she left at least some record in the form of the letters she wrote in her final weeks. Hence the text that follows: namely, a critical-creative experiment that attempts to draw on the ancient, Socratic method of thinking through, or via, a play of philosophic voices. As you will see, the voices belong in particular to two figures, or, possibly, characters, who at first appear to have come as if from nowhere but who gradually prove to be very much going somewhere.
