At some point you learned to use this word, this sound, this little push of muscle and wind, 'I', for self-reference. Before that you probably used 'me' for the same purpose, a more primitive and social form, and it must have felt like a big step to have let it go, to assume the upright and solitary letter, supporting itself in silence and emptiness. The 'm' of 'me', like mummy and milk, still smells of infancy, is smeared with it; the written letter even looks like something crawling along the ground, and the 'eee!' sound retains an odd quality of the hither, the inward-directed, in contrast to the outward thrusting 'aw' or 'oi!', say. The 'I' was a gift from the adult world, a double-faced one conferring new powers and new responsibilities. Because you loved them, and wanted to be loved by them, because of your evident dependence, you took it up and repressed your misgivings about how it was that something vast and non-unitary, something so open and unlimited could be squeezed into this little symbol, this language game. In the beginning there was no word, and that was perfect, but then you were made one, initiated into an order where you would endlessly need to distinguish yourself, an economic and entropic world where identity is work and work is identity. It was at the threshold of this that you discovered the best use that you could make of this new possession, to simply ask yourself, 'who am I?'