posted March 26, 2005 09:22 AM           

Although it doesnt directly address your question about conflicting energy levels, I think the following bears some not too distant relation to the matter at hand.

I am often single-mindedly engaged in some personal (albeit impersonal) pursuit or other, when every interuption comes as a terrible nuisance, and I swat freindly advances away as so many gathering flies, with a curt word, or even a swatting gesture. It is understandable, to me, at least. Some artists are collaborative by nature; actors, for instance. Others (certain directors, lol!) are convinced that collaboration is nothing if not a compromise of artistic vision. True artistic vision, they say, cannot be shared; at least, not until the work is completed.

I am reminded of one of the finest artists of all time, Marcel Proust, who was known for the first part of his life as a social butterfly, and something of a dilettante. It was sometime in his mid-thirties, I think, when he practically retired from society altogether, becoming one of the most infamous recluses of all time, to begin work on his seven volume masterpiece, In Search Of Lost Time. Proust once wrote about friendship as a thing that utterly compromises an artist, if not a human being, perhaps because he found it impossible, or, at least, highly inadvisable, to practice unflinching intellectual honesty wherever one's affections were engaged. For an artist, he seemed to say, friendship is death. The following excerpt from Alan de Botton's famous book on Proust should elucidate this point somewhat:

FRIENDSHIP

It is often assumed, usually by people who don't have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere in which what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others' interests. Proust, less
optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you
with what was on his.

To do anything else would have been bad conversational manners: "There is a lack of tact in people who in their conversation look not to please others, but to elucidate, egoistically, points that they are
interested in. " Conversation required an abdication of oneself in the name of pleasing companions: "When we chat, it is no longer we who speak. ...[W]e are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness
of other people, and not of a self that differs from theirs."

The exaggerated scale of Proust's social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a
friend who proudly shows us a volume of her poetry or her newborn baby. To call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally malevolent intentions, but rather, to confirm our feeling of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people's attachment to their verse and children. There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel toward them and still like them. We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry
and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed
without jeopardizing the union. We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last
person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them."