Life's Pleasures Quote by George William Russell

Russell’s line lands like a small reprimand delivered with a mystic’s dry smile: you want the sublime, but you also want a snack. “Evoke great spirits” is the language of seance and symbolist aspiration, a call to summon the lofty presences of art, ancestry, or the divine. “Eat plums,” by contrast, is stubbornly corporeal: sweet, sticky, seasonal, almost comic in its ordinariness. The clash is the point. He’s staging a tug-of-war between spiritual ambition and sensory appetite, and he refuses to let us pretend they’re effortlessly compatible.

The intent isn’t simple puritanism; it’s a critique of divided attention. Russell, an Irish Revival figure steeped in Theosophy and visionary nationalism, wrote in an era when “culture” was being asked to do civic work: to build a people, a mythology, a future. In that context, plums aren’t sinful so much as distracting, a symbol for the bourgeois comfort that dilutes the intensity required for genuine imaginative or political awakening. The humor softens the blow while sharpening the message: transcendence demands a kind of concentration that modern life keeps sabotaging.

Subtextually, the quote also needles the poseur. It’s easy to perform spiritual seriousness while remaining fundamentally committed to comfort. Russell’s sentence insists that ecstasy has a cost. You don’t ascend by multitasking; you choose what you worship, and your hands can’t hold an offering and a plum at the same time.