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To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning

To Make an End Is to Make a Beginning

The implicit reader assumed by my commentary on the *Confessions* must be a hardy soul. Learned, patient, willing to accept a fierce discipline in order to approach a venerable text whose mixture of readily accessible and infuriatingly remote passages invites alternately glib and uncomprehending readings. Somewhere between those readings lies the possibility of a reading at once more arduous and less plagued by spots of blank incomprehension. The years I spent writing this commentary were ones in which I struggled to achieve such a reading and to make it possible for others. I made a firm decision not to do the reading for others and then just present the results in some tidily wrapped package. There were already too many tidily wrapped packages offering such readings, and it was a wearisome business to distinguish the good ones from the bad. No, I thought, the time had come to stop coddling the reader with presents and turn her loose on the text with a new set of grappling hooks, meaning-extractors, and nuance-detectors.

But not every reader would be grateful. We have come to expect in our culture of the book that "classics" will be managed as user-friendly pleasure gardens, Disneylands of the mind, full of wonders, but demanding no serious thought and holding no real risks. To write a commentary of this sort was to thrust the reader out instead into a kind of wilderness survival training program. No one ever gets lost in Disneyland, but only a few get through wilderness survival training unscathed.

The choices I made in presenting this commentary were arguable in the extreme. Many would prefer Disneyland, while others will object vociferously to my characterization both of my own work and of the alternative forms I am so dismissivley rejecting. To them I would say only that the kind of reading I struggled for seemed worth the years of sometimes almost trance-like work I put into it, and still seems to me worth the...