Topper Bottoms- Essayist, Man of the People, Intellectual

The Essay I Will Not Be Writing

Twenty-five years later, a serious person declines to say where he was

Image created by author on Magnific

I have been asked to write a where-I-was essay.

I have been asked more than once. I have been asked by people whose names I am not at liberty to share, for reasons that are theirs and that I respect, and I will say only that some of them work in what I would loosely call media, and one of them is related to me, and that the requests began arriving in August and have not stopped. I have declined each of them.

I am declining now, in print, so that there is a record.

The where-I-was essay is the lowest form the personal essay takes, and I say this as a man who has practiced the personal essay at a level the Adequate Courier-Gazette saw fit to publish and that other outlets have, for reasons I have addressed elsewhere, declined to. There is no more consequential question in the entire tradition of the personal essay than the question of where one stood, which is exactly why a serious person does not answer it.

Cicero, in the Second Philippic (I read it in Europe, in a departure gate, in a translation I did not care for), warns that the witness who begins by…