The Confessions of St. Augustine 181ing, the insidious and environmentally destructive
attributes of “the south,” particularly citizens of the
United States—whom all of the characters in the
novel equate with environmental “disease”—as jux-
taposed with the Canadians’ supposed innate envi-
ronmentalism. The narrator, along with her lover Joe
and married friends Anna and David, head to the
island in search of the narrator’s missing father. As
they move from the city further into the wilderness,
the characters, particularly David, comment on the
ways that the United States has encroached on the
Canadian wilderness. At one point, he claims, “this
is great... better than in the city. If we could only
kick out the fascist pig Yanks and the capitalists this
would be a neat country.”
The term American is used throughout the text
to designate anyone or any behavior that endangers
the natural environment, and two American fisher-
men are central to the narrative’s examination of the
destruction of nature. While they are out fishing on
the lake, the narrator, Anna, Joe, and David encoun-
ter two men in a fishing boat with an “American flag
on the front and another on the back.” One of the
men asks if they have caught anything; “the other
American throws his cigar butt over the side” and
makes disparaging comments about the lake. The
narrator notes that despite the fact that “we used
to think they were harmless and funny and inept
and faintly loveable,” “we”—Canadians—now see
that “they”—Americans—pose a very real threat
to the pristine wilderness of North Quebec. For
example, when a man claiming to be a member
of “the Detroit branch of the Wildlife Protection
Association of America” appears and offers to buy
the narrator’s father’s home, David warns that the
man is a covert CIA agent out to procure water for
the United States: ‘It’s obvious,’ he says. ‘They’re
running out of water, clean water, they’re dirtying up
all of theirs, right?’
As the four head back to the house after their
encounter with the Americans, the narrator provides
an amazing description of the lake:
Loon voices in the distance; bats flitter past
us, dipping over the water surface, flat calm
now, the shore things, white-gray rocks and
dead trees doubling themselves in the darkmirror. Around us there is the illusion of infi-
nite space or of no space.... It’s like moving
on air, nothing beneath us holding us up.This passage, in that it describes the narrator’s
illusory sensation of weightlessness and infinite
space, alludes to the impermanence of boundaries,
particularly those between the characters’ assump-
tions about Canadian and American environmental
behavior. Later, when the foursome comes upon a
dead heron, killed and “strung... up like a lynch
victim,” the narrator questions why anyone would
kill the bird. She asserts that “it must have been
the Americans” who kill the bird just “to prove they
could do it.” However, when the narrator encounters
the “Americans” several pages later, she discovers
that they are actually from Canada, just like her.
The term American, then, becomes a kind of
label that the narrator applies to any human being
who causes environmental harm. She claims, “I real-
ized it wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans,
the human beings, men and women both. They’d
had their chance but they had turned against the
gods, and it was time for me to choose sides.” The
side that she chooses is the side of nature: She sheds
her clothes, leaves the house, and goes to live in the
wilderness, determined not to disturb “anything else,
that way there would be more room for the animals,
they would be rescued.”
Laura WrightAUGUSTINE, SAINT The Confessions
of St. Augustine (a.d. 397–398)
The Confessions of St. Augustine is probably the
first book-length autobiography and certainly the
most influential. Saint Augustine of Hippo (a.d.
353–430) pioneered the introspective study of one’s
own life; for him, this effort would ultimately
lead to knowledge of God, to whom Confessions is
addressed.
Confessions is divided into 13 books. The first
nine contain a narrative of Augustine’s life up until
age 33, focusing on his religious and moral develop-
ment. Augustine’s life here is quite busy. In traveling
to Carthage, Rome, and Milan to study and teach,
he makes many friends and encounters various reli-