Autobiographies by definition, are a recollection of any given person’s life. What they accomplished, and how they fulfilled their time on this world. Obviously when summarizing an entire life into a number of pages, certain details must be left out for time, and often, more are left out simply due to relevance. Still, an author overall tries to make an illustration of life events and is process of thought. St. Augustine, in his own autobiography, tries to convey how God has been present in his life, and demonstrate how he lived such a life in his time.

An odd detail about St. Augustine’s work is how he reveals the ins and outs of his everyday life. Or more accurately, the lack of how he does so. Throughout his work, many instances are given to demonstrate his struggles, and growth. On top of this, almost every section demonstrates what he was like in his life. For example, his love for the Greek dramas, or his regret of stealing pears with his so-called friends. Now, all of these entries are very fascinating, and do work to demonstrate what Augustine’s life was like. However, it lacks the ins and outs of a complete daily story. Augustine primarily focuses on the major events in his life that pushed him to his conversion to Christianity. His reflection of sin, his lack of guilt, and his pondering of teaching sin and out of religion, are demonstrations of such events. His story focuses on his overall struggle to become a devout Christian. Some things Augustine may have unintentionally left out, as they did not help with his purpose of writing. Such an example would be how he excludes any setting. While it may have been helpful to set a scene for readers, Augustine focused only on what he deemed important to his goal, which was showing his road to conversion.

To many, the choices he made, in regard to his selection may seem odd, and almost non-beneficial to helping the audience understand the written work in front of them. Take any teenager from the modern world and give them a task of writing about any specific event in their life, and it will undoubtedly be filled with a plethora of fluff. We do this as we feel the need to elaborate n any given detail, so as to make sure our audience can understand our exact solution. This is even visible in just any passing conversation between friends. This may seem like a stupid mistake to some, as we are seemingly overloading our listeners with an information overload. However, Augustine seems to do the exact opposite, and leaves out every given detail, making it near impossible to understand his given situation. We never hear him talk about his day in full, nor even just a daily routine in quick passing. Instead all we get is a puzzle of impactful events, with no connection between them. If I were given an opportunity to write an autobiography like Augustine, I would likely seek to include every detail about my life, even the seemingly insignificant ones. I would want to leave a full account of the world today for future generations, as I would want them to know exactly what my life was like, so they could envision themselves in it. Obviously,  I would forget to include small details like what meals and how things work, but I believe the details would prove to be the most interesting to later generations of students. There however would be key details of events and situations I would have a hard time passing up, still, however. I could not write my story without including details about our current political climate or the pandemic, and even then my life now looks different than it did 6 months ago. It is so important to include a larger picture of what is happening in the world as a whole, to provide insight for character growth and changes. What we have experienced in 2020 is all but unprecedented in the grand scheme of things and if I was the one reading accounts of this year in the future, it would be beyond frustrating if the author had left out such details.

After reading what we have so far in St. Augustine’s Confessions, this is the conclusion I have come too. Even as times change, the importance of the times changes. I would want to exaggerate on the details, as I know how history is affected by a lack of details and want to prevent this for the future. However, Augustine’s only goal was to demonstrate his path to Christianity, and as such, had different thoughts on the importance of events.