Member-only story
Topper Bottoms- Essayist, Man of the People, Intellectual
The Man Who Never Threw One at Me
Noël Godin, the ethics of the pastry, and what happened at Adequate Regional in the spring of 1984
A man died in Brussels on the twenty-third of August and I learned of it this morning.
I want to account for the gap. Twenty-three days. Twenty-three mornings, each of them beginning the way my mornings have begun since 2019, with the filtration, with the clarity that follows the filtration, with the forty or so minutes in which I am, by my own assessment and by the assessment of at least one listener who wrote in, most receptive to the information that is available to a person who has made himself available to it. Twenty-three mornings in which this information was available and did not reach me. I am not going to speculate about why. I have a document about why. It is not finished.
The day before yesterday, I have since learned, would have been his eighty-first birthday. I learned that this morning too, in the same sitting, which is the kind of convergence a less disciplined observer would call a coincidence and which I have trained myself, at some cost, to simply notice and record.
