Christopher Hitchin, who is fast catching up with Bellow as the writer whose books I feel compelled to press everyone I meet into to reading, or if they don't then take me off their Christmas card list, has an article in a recent Vanity Fair on losing his voice to the pernicious cancer that's stolen it's way into him.

But, as is the case with the Hitch, there's always much more; and this is an article on how to talk, how speech influences prose, and the utter joy of those deep, memorable conversations that happen between friends.

How do we realise the value of a transcendental conversation? When the likelihood of one occurring again fades, even jeopardised, or worst of all, recedes into an ever diminishing point, until there's nothing but darkness. That's when. Absence, not presence.

Hitchin's quotes a wonderful piece of verse to show this. It's from an adaptation of Heraclitus by the Victorian poet, William Cory

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

Is n't that great? I tired the sun when I was a student and still do thirty years on