Gass's speech was an extended meditation on language and the inner life, delivered in the ornate, layered prose for which he was celebrated. He began by imagining a dinner party — 'pleasantries: gossip, tittle-tattle, perilously keen remarks' — before turning to the deeper question of what talk really is. His argument was that speech inevitably reveals us. 'The monster we choose to be on Halloween says something about the monster we are,' he said, adding with characteristic wit: 'I have often gone to masquerades as myself, and in that guise no one knew I was there.' The metaphor set up his larger claim: that language is not merely a tool for communication but the very substance of selfhood. Quoting Ben Jonson — 'Speake that I may see thee' — and Emerson — 'Man is only half himself; the other half is his expression' — he argued that our words are who we are.