Life & Wisdom Quote by William Plomer

Plomer’s line doesn’t romanticize creativity as a lightning bolt; it demotes the muse and promotes the switchboard operator. The “power” here is less mystical gift than practiced capacity: the ability to look at two objects, ideas, or experiences that sit in different mental filing cabinets and insist they belong in the same sentence. That framing matters because it treats originality not as invention from nothing, but as recombination under pressure - a method available to anyone willing to risk the embarrassment of unlikely pairings.

The phrase “seemingly unconnected” is doing the quiet heavy lifting. It admits the connections are often real but socially unlicensed: we’ve been trained not to see them, or to see them and dismiss them as childish, tasteless, or irrelevant. Plomer, writing across modernism’s long shadow, knew a culture where rules of taste were both rigid and collapsing. Modernist art, collage, psychoanalysis, and later advertising all run on the same engine: splice disparate elements and a third meaning appears. His formulation captures that alchemy without sounding like a manifesto.

Subtext: creativity is an act of defiance against conventional categories - race, class, genre, propriety, “serious” versus “popular.” Plomer’s own life and work, shaped by movement between South Africa and Britain and by the coded constraints of his era, make the emphasis on hidden linkages feel personal as well as aesthetic. The intent isn’t to flatter artists; it’s to describe a cognitive stance. If you can connect what everyone else keeps apart, you can make new art, new arguments, new ways of living.