First Person Singular
A note on the text:
These little essays are something like a snapshot of notes growing into a very rough first draft. It will, naturally, be edited, culled and rewritten before I move on. I don’t however expect the tone to change much. This is a journey for me as much as it is a repository of knowledge for anyone else and I intend to affect the same style of breezy chat in my finished thesis which has always been found in my correspondence (both with myself and with others). This might be viewed as too casual – not academic enough. I shall refer any such criticism to Thoreau who prefaced Walden thusly:
“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.�