Question

To the residents of High Wycombe, Alistair Finch was a fixture as immutable as the town hall obelisk. For forty years, he sat behind the leaded glass of his shop, his magnifying loupe affixed to his brow like a third eye. While the townspeople regarded his meticulous restoration of antique timepieces with a mixture of awe and impatience, Finch himself remained entirely indifferent to their opinions. He did not work to please the local gentry, nor did he seek the validation of the clockmakers' guild in London, which had twice denied him membership on account of his unorthodox escapement designs. Instead, Finch was driven by an unyielding, almost adversarial relationship with time itself. He viewed every rusted gear and warped mainspring not as a mechanical failure, but as a personal insult leveled by the universe. His daughter, Clara, often observed that her father approached a broken carriage clock with the same grim hostility a general might reserve for a besieging army, refusing to rest until the mechanism surrendered to his demands.

According to the passage, Alistair Finch’s attitude toward the opinions of the townspeople is characterized by which of the following traits?