I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

This remark is associated with Thoreau’s defense of the first-person voice in his writing, especially in the opening of *Walden* where he anticipates readers’ objections to his apparent self-focus. Writing in the mid-1840s after his experiment in deliberate living at Walden Pond, Thoreau frames autobiography as a practical necessity: one can only testify with full authority about one’s own experience. The line functions as a wry preface to a book that uses personal narrative not for confession but as a lens for social critique—of work, consumption, and conformity in antebellum New England.

Thoreau’s remark is a wry defense of first-person writing: he speaks most about himself not from vanity but from epistemic honesty. The self is the one subject he can claim to know directly and intimately, whereas other people’s motives and inner lives remain partly conjectural. The line also gestures toward his broader Transcendentalist project—using personal experience as a lens for moral and philosophical inquiry—while acknowledging the social suspicion that self-scrutiny can resemble self-absorption. In effect, Thoreau reframes autobiography as a method: the “I” becomes the most reliable instrument for examining conscience, society, and nature.