Of all life’s pleasures, conversation has always struck me as the most energizing and delightful. A good conversation has no particular purpose. Like contemplating a beautiful work of art, conversing is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.
Some of the best conversationalists I have known were older Englishmen, born right after the Second World War. In their education, they were, I believe, far closer to the 19th century than they were to the 21st. Nowadays I often get the impression that British education fell off a cliff sometime around 2000.
According to multiple sources, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the most scintillating conversationalist of his era (1772-1834), which is saying something, as it was an era of fascinating characters. Coleridge could purportedly talk about any subject with extraordinary knowledge, gusto, and imagination. As Thomas De Quincy wrote of him:
Coleridge, like some great river, swept at once . . . into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive.
In this episode of the HOT ZONE, Dr. McCullough and I endeavored to have a free flowing conversation from one topic to the next. The great thing about living during our bizarre era is that there is never any shortage of things to talk about.
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