Nobody starts out saying 'I am', typically it is a realisation which dawns suddenly at age about three, that is, after there is already a well established sense of external being and some facility with language. Nevertheless, when you look at the awestruck gaze of an intelligent infant, even one that is newly born, it seems as if they are steeped in the sense of self-existence and that they are absorbing the world in which they find themselves into this prior sense. It is not so much 'thrownness', Geworfenheit, with its connotation of a sort of gnostic alienation, that is in play but something more integrated, more akin, connatural, a wonder, even a sort of love for the very thatness of what they see around them. The realisation of 'I am' which is embodied in that verbal formula is the sense that your own existence is also precisely that same thatness, in immediacy and without any sense or interpretation of alienation, without any metaphysical politicisation. On the other side the pure existence of things, the heidegerrian Vorhandenheit, has an enigmatic quality, a sense of being far more than it appears, of hidden depth, which is imported, transferred or projected from the unknown depths of the self, from mysteries of desire, say, which open up to us what lies beneath the verbal and rationalised formulas by which we locate ourselves in the human world.