W. is impressed by my stammer. You stammer and stutter, says W., and you swallow half your words. What's wrong with you? Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it's mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it. You had one just there, didn't you?
Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it is there nonetheless. Something inside you knows you talk rubbish, W. says. Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth.
W. dreams of serious conversation. Not that it would have serious topics, you understand, he says - that it would be concerned for example with the great topics of the day. Speech itself would be serious, he says with great vehemence. That's what he's found with the real thinkers he's known. Everything they say is serious, they're incapable of being unserious.
Even I become serious when a real thinker is about., W.'s observed. We remember that afternoon in Greenwich when W. was lost in conversation with one such thinker. I was leaning in, trying to listen; I had a sense of the seriousness of the conversation, W. could see it, he was impressed, for once I wasn't going to ruin it by talking about blowholes or something.
Conversation!, exclaims W., that's what friendship's all about, I think even you have a sense of that. It's why you stammer, says W. it's why you swallow half of your words.