Despite talent – all great things require collaborators

I have now written a few times about the value of self-augmentation through disciplined skill acquisition and the pursuit of individual talent. In response to which, an op-ed by David Brooks entitled Genius: The Modern View has been brought to my attention which shares some of my conclusions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?ref=opinion

But the attention paid to individual efforts--certainly an obsession of western cultures--may seem to imply that a focused individual is all that matters in the creation of value. Nothing could be further from the truth. A focused individual is necessary, but not sufficient. For intense and sustained collaboration is of the essence for any meaningful work and its fruits. But there are many forms of collaboration, and all too often, we misunderstand and overlook the sustained networks of intercourse in which an apparently quiet craftsman is embedded. Likewise, we can overrate the boisterous activity of a group and equate its noise with valuable output, when in fact – all of this groups production may remain noise that will cease to reverberate and be heard no more.

In the arts, collaboration can come quite literally, as in the team required to produce a film, or a musical band, or T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, author and creative editor on The Waste Land. But even if collaboration may not be present in this sense, it is always and inescapably present in the form of influence—and influence is the driving force behind all great works.

As Harold Bloom (cf. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages) has often said, no one is Adam early in the morning. And for better or for worse we are all interred in an old earth with weighty traditions which invigorate our minds, lungs and bodies just as they asphyxiate all the same. But the powerful find ways to stir the earth they are immersed in with their own spirit. They bring new breeds into full bloom, whose presence mesmerizes their contemporaries and will cast a shadow upon those to come. That is precisely the trick – how to bring something new and beautiful into this old vale of the world. How can we escape the asphyxia of forever laying dormant beneath the stale shadows of the thoughts of others and their determinations?

But nothing created is ever truly new – it must be worked in such a way that it challenges old thoughts, old ways of viewing things, old stories and their conclusions. In this way, we come to see that there is only so much space in the clearing of human influence. And new trees must raise themselves by feeding on the nutrients of the old. Yet in so far as they are nurtured by the bodies of the vanquished, we all remain one: past, present and future. We are at different moments of one grand cycle. But the true learning is to acknowledge that all success is necessarily embedded in this cycle, and therefore depends on the wisdom of old even as it vanquishes it – and will similarly fall to the efforts of future antagonists.