It's St. Augustine's feast day. By coincidence, I ran across this yesterday in Fr. James Schall's new book, The Life of the Mind:
One of the books that we must have in our library is Augustine's Confessions, a book that, perhaps better than any other, accounts for the restlessness we cannot help but feel in our own souls concerning why we are here and what we are about. We are not only supposed to wonder about the highest things, but we are restless until we find them. As a very gifted but undisciplined young man of eighteen or nineteen, Augustine tells us, he came across a dialogue of Cicero (the Hortensius, now lost) written half a millennium earlier. He read this dialogue, and it changed his life. He decided to pursue the truth. However, it still took Augustine a long time to figure things out. The young Augustine is still greatly attractive to us because he literally tried everything.
