The Confessional 'I'

One small word carries the whole of Walden: the 'I' that Thoreau refuses to drop. Most books hide that word; he keeps it on every page, and readers have called it egotism ever since. Kaag thinks the first person is the oldest move in philosophy, and this episode traces the lineage: a gadfly in the Athenian marketplace, a theologian confessing his doubts, a Frenchman writing alone in a tower. Then the harder question, the one Kaag faces in his own books: where is the line between an account of a life and a monument to a self? Socrates answers it at his trial, with everything at stake.