Bruno’s Reviews > Confessions: A New Translation > Status Update

The end of book 9: his dying mother cared nothing for burial in her homeland, only asked to be remembered at God's altar. And now Augustine writes, "Let them [all who read this book] remember [her] with dutiful fondness." Multiplied filial piety, all his readers become her mourners. But the dream of a multiple is a fear of/wish for castration, says Freud. We all fail in this request: "Remember me."

Book 9, the death of his friend Nebridius: such wan mourning ("Now he doesn't put his ear to my lips; instead, he puts his lips to the spirit of your spring") compared to the friend who died in book 4, before Augustine's conversion. Back then, "I hated everything, because nothing had him in it." Better to be mourned by Augustine the peri-convert.

...for who else calls us back from every one of death's delusions, if not the life that *doesn't know how to die*...

How odd to include "doesn't know" there. The life that doesn't die, sure, but doesn't *know how* to die? Or maybe the life that doesn't know death. But the incapacity of not knowing how seems odd. Zombie-like, too.

"I dreaded death: I didn't want the one I had loved so much to die in his entirety when I died."

Apart from the implication that he got over this and people stopped dying, I really like this.