Because I came to seeThat I should never have been 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 best,A competent copier, possessed by the cravingTo 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 occasionsWhen I am transported- a different person,Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation,And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it.But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment-That state of utter exhaustion and peaceWhich comes in dying to give something life…

Because I came to seeThat I should never have been 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 best,A competent copier, possessed by the cravingTo 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 occasionsWhen I am transported- a different person,Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation,And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it.But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment-That state of utter exhaustion and peaceWhich comes in dying to give something life…

– T.S Eliot –

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