Farmington by Clarence Darrow — Read

I begin this story with the personal pronoun. To begin it in any other way would be only a commonplace assumption of a modesty that I do not really have. It is most natural that the personal pronoun should stand as the first word of this tale, for I cannot remember a time when my chief thoughts and emotions did not concern myself, or were not in some way related to myself. I look back through the years that have passed, and find that the first consciousness of my being and the hazy indistinct memories of my childhood are all about myself,-what the world, and its men and its women, and its beasts and its plants, meant to me. This feeling is all there is of the past and all there is of the present; and as I look forward on my fast shortening path, I am sure that my last emotions, like my first, will come from the impressions that the world is yet able to make upon the failing senses that shall still connect me with mortal life.

So why should I not begin this tale with the personal pronoun? And why should I not use it over and over again, with no effort to disguise the fact that whatever the world may be to you, still to me it is nothing except as it influences and affects my life and me?