Not a Detail Person?

  There is an oft misconstrued conception of the detailed mind as belonging solely to the practical man, to the administrator, or to those with particular aptitude in the art of multi-tasking. While certainly attention to detail properly belongs to all the above mentioned,  it seems there is a potentially dangerous reduction of "detail-minded" to merely the practical or pragmatic man, and not nearly enough attention -- or detail, if I may say -- given to the thoroughly detail capturing mind of the intellectual, artist, or any other of the less practical, and more speculatively directed minds.
    
   To illustrate, consider the work of the performing artist. Not one single movement, tone, position, expression etc. is directed towards any real practical end, yet the completion of a virtuoso performance insists on a great and arduous attention to detail. The violinist must attune his or her ear to the most minute and subtle differences in tone, pitch, and dynamic until each of the uncountable details of motion are subconsciously embedded in the whole body of the performer. In comparison, there is almost no difference between the beginner and the experienced performer as there is between the experienced and one who has really mastered the art; and that difference lies entirely in the complete command of detail in the mind of the artist.   

  Or take for example a masterful architect, such as the designer of that pristine Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp whose brilliance surely contains more carefully crafted details than all of the recently constructed churches in America combined. But are we to say that all the intricate shapes and curves, all the illustrative symbolism sketched into the stone of this great House of God kept in the mind of the architect, that these are not really indications of a "detail person".

  The implication in a pragmatic, utilitarian society such as ours is that if the details of our mind are not production-apt, then they are really not worthwhile details. Consider the colloquial definite description "absent-minded professor". It is perhaps fitting of a man who loses his keys or who forgets what he ate just hours ago. He is absent-minded in that sense. But is entirely unfitting in the sense that his mind is anything but absent minded. It is full of details of a different sort, abstract details, universals and their relations to particular things. We have a sense of this intuitively, but we feel it is good nonetheless to pin that sort of detail-mind as quirky, quixotic, and most of all impractical. But perhaps this is more an error of value judgment than a misuse of the word detail. Perhaps there are details of the mind which are more important than the proletariat would admit. Perhaps the impractical man is really a detail-person