Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. 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.

I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. Some have asked what I got to eat if I did not feel lonesome if I was not afraid and the like. I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau