An artist can, at times, be perfectly happy with a state another profession might take as neglect. The artist thrives in the condition another individual might take to be loneliness, regarding it as a chance to get something done. Or, he or she just gets use to it, doesn't complain about it, uses it to feed the vision, the spiritual backbone by which works are accomplished. In a given moment, a mind has many directions to go in, perhaps in the way an atom works, protonic thoughts zipping in energy around a glowing nucleus. In the quiet of neglect that mind operates as a whole, the core and the outer layers in tune, sympathetically vibrating, so that an outer thought concerning the world as it is manifested in all its detail is directly related to the centered wisdom at the core. To consider oneself as being neglected is some outward-based interference pattern that has not much to do with the wheels that tick away in some task that leaves the mind free to muse and work.

It is for such good reasons that artists, thinkers, writers, composers, etc., behave the way the do, with the inherent reward system of accomplishment they have placed an intuitive faith in and then pursued again and again. Another person though, may well regard such an individual's behavior as being that of a complete dope, not seeing the deeper mechanism, the core of the eternal mind ever engaged perhaps to the expense of the countless decisions and choices one is supposed to make in the course of labors and social lives. The artist may appear, from an outside perspective, 'not to care.' Which is far from the truth.

Eliot spoke of this healthy neglect in Preludes, the 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.' In fact, you can find it in a lot of art out there, or at least make it up if it's not there.