Inward journey to the self is the only way to find myself and redeem myself. This journey is often missed and loses the way. One always feels that there is a great and present danger that the subject will slip away altogether, that it will vanish into thinnest air, leaving behind the perception that there is no such creature as I am. But I am with a history and multiple relations. My story is the story of my relations. Autobiography is the story of self-narrated to the other. But this sense of “elusiveness,” this critical anxiety over the subject “slipping away,” derives from the formal multiplicity of autobiographies themselves. The mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. The identity which autobiography seeks to express is always blurred, for the narrative can only bring the autobiographer to that continual ‘passing’ in which he writes. To conceive autobiography as a mode of confession involves the impulse to close the ontological gap between my story and others. Conscious awareness is only a “smaller apartment” attached to the “large ante-room” of the unconscious. He asks of memory, “But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain?

Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? I am lost in wonder when I consider this problem. It bewilders me”

As Wordsworth wrote

“I cannot say what portion is in truth

The naked recollection of that time,

And what may rather have been called to life

By after-meditation.”

This highlights two important phrases, namely “naked recollection” and “after-meditation.” To have a personality and a story to tell and a story for others to narrate is the access to “the naked recollection” of the past and future, but without its distortions. It was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Christian tradition of thought. Inwardness is not a simple return to the I. Augustine’s innovative, epistemological method, which, directed towards certain knowledge, turns away from the “outwardness” of the world towards the “inwardness” of the self at its deepest level. This corresponds to the realm of being.

For Augustine, God is to be found in the intimacy of self-presence. We must knock at the door. Only then shall we receive what we ask and find what we seek; only then shall the door be opened to us. For Augustine it is precisely this intense autobiographical vein in the Confessions, that sets it apart from the intellectual tradition. He achieves what few autobiographers attempt: the complete explanation of a life. What is present in Augustine as a seed blossoms into the mad, tangled tree of modern, confessional literature. It is a narrative of personal and spiritual crisis and conversion, which is self-consciously modelled after the Biblical archetype of the Fall and the Redemption. The autobiography of David Copperfield, for example, can be presumed innocent because David Copperfield did not exist. But all autobiographies are corrupted by the present. Despite his claims to rebirth and transfiguration, he is not exempt from this “corruption by the present” – the original sin of autobiography. He confesses to have “muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness and clouded its clear waters with hell’s black river of lust.” The method of autographic reading refuses the closure of fictive finality, it opens up the possibility of a critical discourse sensitive to historical context.

The existence of God allows him to act in truth, making my confession both in my heart before you and before the many who will read it. Memory is a “great field,” which becomes a “spacious palace” and finally a “storehouse for countless images.” Augustine says, “The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary.” He wrote: “Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How then can it be part of it if it is not contained in it?” As Wordsworth sings

“Which have yet such self-presence in my mind

That sometimes when I think of them I seem

Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself,

And of some other being.”