In June I had to struggle to get over jet lag since returning from a pilgrimage to Augustinian sties in Italy. During my trip, particularly on the traveling days, it was difficult to keep track of the time—both physically and mentally. We left Philadelphia in the late afternoon on a Sunday, spent eight hours on the plane, and when we arrived in Milan, it was Monday morning. I had lost six hours, so it felt like the middle of the night. But to keep to schedule, we needed to proceed as though we had just started our day. At a certain point, it became difficult to know if I should keep pushing myself or succumb to my fatigue. If I kept eating and drinking espresso, could I trick my body into believing that those lost six hours were meaningless?

What meaning does time carry anyway? My analog watch ticking away on my wrist in Eastern Daylight Time could no longer tell me what time of day it was where I was, though my phone automatically switched to Central European Summer Time the moment it connected to the internet. Which one was correct?

And why is time so variable depending on place? Who decides what time it is? Why do we keep switching back and forth between standard and daylight time? Does that not seem to undermine our system of measuring time altogether?

In feeling befuddled by time, it is a comfort to know that I am not alone. Augustine writes in book 11 of the Confessions that “[his] mind is on fire” as he tries to think through the “most intricate enigma” that is time (conf. 11.22.28; tr. Boulding). To be sure, Augustine is asking much deeper questions than why daylight-savings time exists and why we have different time zones across the world (all products of human-made political decisions); he is trying to make sense of what it means for the world to have a beginning and be rooted in time when God exists apart from time and is eternal.

“You [God] have made all eras of time and you are before all time, and there was never a ‘time’ when time did not exist. There was therefore never any time when you had not made anything, because you made time itself. And no phases of time are coeternal with you, for you abide, and if they likewise were to abide, they would not be time. For what is time?” (conf. 11.13.16-11.14.17).

Thinking about time in this way makes my head spin, especially as Augustine tries to disentangle what we mean by the past, present, and future and delineate memory and expectation from attention (conf. 11.14.17-11.21.27). Augustine even touches on my own confusion with time, traveling, and jet lag, as he considers what truly constitutes a day, whether we can trust the sun, moon, and stars to be accurate markers of time, and how we can be possibly measure time when we are not fully able to define it (conf. 11.23.29-11.25.32).

When reading this dizzying account of time, one might be tempted to ask: why does Augustine include this in the Confessions? Would this perhaps not be better suited to be included among his works on Genesis or as a separate treatise? How does this relate back to the earlier books of the text?

While book 11 does in many ways feel like a departure from the preceding ten books, I think that its connection to the rest of the work is strong, though perhaps not always clear from the outset. In the Confessions, Augustine tells his story—a story about his journey to becoming a baptized Christian but also about how he came to have being. When he concludes his discussion of his own particular narrative in book nine, in book 10 he turns to the question of memory, and here in book 11 he considers the origin of all humankind “in the beginning.” In other words, to make sense of our individual existence, we must try to make sense of our shared existence in time. Augustine shows us in book 11 that if we are to better understand ourselves we must think of ourselves as beings rooted in time, which is a tension of our consciousness (11.26.33).

And yet how can we understand time as tension if it is so mind-boggling? Here is where I think we continue to learn a great deal about Augustine in book 11, even though we have left the narrative portions of the text behind. To try to explain time, Augustine gives the example of reciting a memorized poem aloud. One knows the poem in its entirety, but as the recitation begins, past lines become memory and future lines expectation, all while one’s attention must be present on the current words leaving one’s lips. “As the poem goes on and on, expectation is curtailed and memory prolonged, until expectation is entirely used up, when the whole completed action has passed into memory…The same thing happens in the entirety of a person’s life, of which all his actions are parts; and the same in the entire sweep of human history, the parts of which are individual human lives” (conf. 11.28.38).

In this beautiful metaphor of recitation, so familiar to him as a teacher of rhetoric, Augustine gives us insight not only into the passage and meaning of time but also into himself. We are invited to see the world as he does, to learn to think in his way, and to see time anew with him.

While I cannot say that I understand the mystery of time, and particularly God’s eternity, this book of the Confessions does open up for me more insight into Augustine by seeing what metaphors he turns to, what questions preoccupy him, and what connections he draws between his story and the story of all creation. It is a book that shows us what makes him tick.