Documentation of daily life has always been a facet of history that has intrigued many people, leading to deeper understandings of cultures and to new and exciting discoveries about civilizations. Augustine’s Confessions is a prime example of how history can be forgotten due to a lack of details deemed unnecessary by the author. It is these details that we as people see as boring elements of life, that enthrall historians. In our own current lives there are many details that on paper would not make any sense to include by today’s standards but they could become very important in the future, something Augustine either did not consider or something he realized and intentionally avoided.

My life is full of many things fueled by technology that has allowed me opportunities that people of the past could only dream of, yet if I were to write a novel detailing my life I doubt I would ever include the machines and gadgets that allow for my life to be the way it is. I would never include the many hours I spend looking at a screen or the trips I take in a car or a plane. I would find those details to be incredibly dull. However that could all change in the future, if people look back on this time and wonder how we spent our days, they may not realize all the time that screens spend in our lives. I believe that I also would not include daily interactions with people whom I might deem irrelevant to what my novel is about, as I would never be writing a novel to detail daily life it would have to pertain to something I was trying to achieve in my life or it would be about how I reached a certain point in my life, thus the journey would only pertain to getting to that point. In leaving out detail that only leads to the main goal, I would likely intentionally withhold information that involves parts of my life that I deem to be low points either for me as a person or points that would be considered disheartening, as these periods of my life would take away from the novel or they may be something I would not wish to share. These sorts of omissions result in a novel that jumps around a timeline and has many gaps that for readers who do not understand the time itself or details of the person could be deemed extremely confusing.

Augustine manages to create this confusion in his own writing when it comes to certain details. He specifically leaves much of his journey from place to place undocumented something that for readers could be confusing as he jumps from place to place. Such as when he was travelling to Thagaste to Carthage and removed the journey of how he got there despite that journey being more than a short trip to a neighboring city. Augustine also manages to leave out details of his love life despite being with a woman, whom he never mentioned by name, for over ten years and whom he had a son with. This lack of detail was likely by choice as he was with her out of wedlock and had a child with her, something highly frowned upon in his religion. Yet for being such a major portion of his life the lack of detail about this woman is still surprising. He also had little detail about his son who was his only child, something that was likely a result of the child’s early death and thus something he did not wish to write about. In his work Augustine discussed some aspects of his work and how he did not enjoy teaching rhetoric in Carthage or Rome, but this is only the surface of his work, he never truly dove into what it was like teaching during this time, only stating how his class in Rome would cheat him out of money or his class in Carthage was too rowdy. The details of a class would have been too mundane in a reading at that time, but now would hold many key insights into the minds and understandings of people at the time. 

Omissions of work are not always the result of someone intentionally trying to keep the reader in the dark, but they often result in such a feeling. In our own writing we often select only the most interesting or important parts of our lives and avoid the parts that we deem irrelevant or parts that we may be hesitant to include and this is the same way in which Augustine looked at his own life.