worlds smartest website John Brockman New York. 2011. Pnotographriy Peter IN CONVERSATION JOHN BROCKMAN'S EXCHANGE WITH JOHN NAUGHTON John Naughton I see you've been variously described as a "cultural impresario" and an "intellectual enzyme". How would you describe yourself? John Brockman Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem "Man With the Blue Guitar": Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say ofwhat you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. Any attempt to describe myself would end in awkwardness, confusion and contradiction. Also, I like to keep changing the subject, to surprise myself. JN What's your intellectual background? From which of the original "T.vo Cultures" do you come?M an engineer, so this two/three cultures stuff really resonates with me. JB In 1944, at three and a half years old, I was stricken with spinal meningitis and was in a coma for six weeks at Boston's children's hospital. The doctors had given up on me when, unexpectedly, I opened my eyes. I am told the first thing I said was:1 want to go to New York- ! arrived there at age 20 in 1961 for graduate school at Columbia. I was immediately struck by, and impressed with, the argumentative and exciting culture in which conversations were being carried out month after month in the pages of literary magazines such as Commentary, Partisan Review and the UK's Encounter. For a dollar or two, I was privileged to look over the shoulders of the intelligentsia of the day - Lionel Trilling. Stephen Spender, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin et al - as they went at one another over important issues such as the Eichmann trial and/ or more trivial pursuits as to who slept with whom on a particular Bloomsbury weekend or who was still a Stalinist after the purge trials of 1937. It's interesting to note that while I was ostensibly at Columbia to study economics and finance, my interests and instincts were strictly