Garth Greenwell and Daddy Augustine

Rendering thought

I just finished Garth Greenwell’s course Daddy Augustine, advertised via his substack this fall. It connected on many levels. In addition to his writerly and historical eye, Garth was an incredibly thoughtful teacher, and brought a generosity of listening to the class that transformed it from a seminar into (for me at least) a pressing, meaningful encounter with the text.

We read Sarah Ruden’s new translation of Confessions, which is known for its bold and contemporary take on the classic work. When there is room in the Latin to choose the body or the mind, Ruden often chooses the body: so too she seems to lean toward immediacy, and balances the text’s interiority with an earthy precision of language. No matter the translation, Augustine’s words often feel like they could have been written just minutes ago, as a direct address to the reader. The briskness of Ruden’s translation preserved that for me, and at times even made it strange: an estrangement that was pleasing and surprising, an invitation to read the text as if for the first time.

Of the organizing questions that motivated the course, two stuck out as particularly relevant in my own projects. The first was this:

How can thinking become a narratively compelling event?

That is, how might Augustine’s writing lead us to think about the ways that we render consciousness, memory, and interior experience, in a way that, rather than being navel-gazing or precious, elevates the work (and the reader’s experience). Writing about thinking is a difficult task, and to do it in a way that is porous to the world, open to change and dislocation, and avoids resting in cautious, adjudicated abstraction is something I’d urgently like to explore.

The second question was this:

How might orienting oneself toward one’s deep sources (aesthetic, moral, spiritual) re-orient a working artist toward his or her own values, modes of expression, and practice?

For me, this question is one to live alongside for a while. I’m already a believer in the ways that tracking down the sources and influences of the thinkers one admires can serve as its own type of education. When I’ve done it most recently, starting with Simone Weil, a superstructure emerges that is almost like a fractal, something natural that you could find on the beach, with widening circles of interlocking conversations, preoccupations, and insights that cohere but never quite close.

Augustine seems to me to be a poet of desire. The burning heart that serves as a symbol of his order is apt, and his writing reveals not just a deeply articulate thinker but an ardent seeker. In the final class, Garth quoted the poet Frank Bidart regarding the criterion by which a writer, or any other person perhaps, might make sense of the difficult to articulate desire that spurs them on: it is the desire, he said, to make something commensurate to our will to make.

For Augustine, there is an even greater inexhaustibility to that will and desire. My soul’s house is too meager for you to visit; Ruden’s translation reads: Enlarge it.