T. S. Eliot Truths; More Questions

I'm reading a book of T. S. Eliot's plays for my English book, and I've found something that applies, I feel, quite directly to me. In a way, this is an extension of a previous post, something about my inability to create, to find my place in the world. This selection is from T. S. Eliot's "The Confidential Clerk," a dialogue between Colby Simkins (a young man, recently employed to be Sir Mulhammer's private secretary) and Sir Claude Mulhammer, a financier. I'll let the words speak for themselves.

Sir Claude. Yes, I did not want to be a financier.

Colby. What did you want to do?

Sir Claude.      I wanted to be a potter.

Colby. A potter!

Sir Claude.        A potter. When I was a boy

I loved to shape things. I loved form and colour

And I loved the material that the potter handles.

Most people think that a sculptor or a painter

Is something more excellent to be than a potter.

Most people that of china or porcelain

As merely for use, or for decoration --

In either case, an inferior art.

For me, they are neither 'use' nor 'decoration' --

That is, decoration as a background for living;

For me, they are life itself. To be among such things,

If it is an escapee, is escape into living,

Escape from a sordid world to a pure one.

Sculpture and painting -- I have some good things --

But they haven't this... remoteness I have always longed for.

I want a world where the form is the reality,

Of which the substantial is only a shadow.

It's strange. I have never talked of this to anyone.

Never until now. Do you feel at all like that

When you are alone with your music?

Colby.     Just the same.

All the time you've been speaking, I've been translating

Into terms of music. But I may ask,

With this passion for... ceramics, how did it happen

That you never made it your profession?

Sir Claude. Family pressure, in the first place.

My father -- your grandfather -- built us this business

Starting from nothing. It was his passion.

He loved it with the same devotion

That I gave to clay, and what could be done with it --

What I hoped I could do with it. I thought I despised him

When I was young. And yet I was in awe of him.

I was wrong, in both. I loathed this occupation

Until I began to feel my power in it.

The life changed me, as it is changing you:

It begins as kind of a make-believe

And the make-believing makes it real.

That's not the whole story. My father knew I hated it:

That was a grief to him. He knew, I am sure,

That I cherished for a long time a secret reproach:

But after his death, and then it was too late,

I knew that he was right. And all my life

I have been atoning. To a dead father,

Who had always been right. I never understood him.

I was too young. And when I was mature enough

To understand him, he was not there.

Colby. You've still not explained why you came to think

That your father had been right.

Sir Claude.    Because I came to see

That I should never have become a first-rate potter.

I didn't have it in me. It's strange, isn't it,

That a man should have a consuming passion

To do something for which he lacks the capacity?

Could a man be said to have a vocation

To be a second-rate potter? To be, at least,

A competent copier, possessed by the craving

To create, when one is wholly uncreative?

I don't think so. For I came to see

That I had always known, at the secret moments,

That I didn't have it in me. There are occasions

When I am transported -- a different person

Transfigured in the vision of some marvelous creation,

And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it.

But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment --

The state of utter exhaustion and peace

Which comes in dying to give something to life...

I intend that you shall have a good piano. The best.

And when you are alone at your piano, in the evening,

I believe you will go through the private door

Into the real world, as I do, sometimes.

Colby. Indeed, I have felt, while you have been talking,

That it's my own feelings you have expressed,

Although the medium is different. I know

I should never have become a great organist,

As I aspired to be. I'm not an executant;

I'm only a shadow of the great composers.

Always, when I play to myself,

I hear the music I should like to have written,

As the composer heard it when it came to him;

But when I played before other people

I was always conscious that what they heard

Was not what I hear when I play to myself.

What I hear is a great musician's music,

What they hear is an inferior rendering.

So I've given up trying to play to other people:

I am only happy when I play to myself.

Andrew again. This bit at the last is what really resonates with me. I'd like to repeat the one line, "I'm not an executant; I'm only a shadow of the great composers[, artists, writers, whatevers!]." And what I don't need is consolation. Because that won't change it. That won't change it at all. You know, when you hear whatever you don't want to hear, it's hard to register -- especially when it isn't true. True to yourself.

Be true to yourself. Who is yourself? Are you what other people say you are? That's how I feel I am. I really don't know who I am, what I am...

How does one become oneself?