The bourgeois are forever torn between the normal and the exotic. The average is their medium, but they crave the extraordinary. When they acquire it—by purchase, by package—they render it ordinary.

  Consider pizza. When the bourgeois first encounters it—on a touristic trip, naturally—it is a revelation: exotic, primal, authentic. They bring it home. They naturalize it, commercialize it, normalize it. Soon it’s on every corner, or delivered straight to your door—complete with The Bureaucrat’s kiss: “Open box before eating pizza.”

  And once pizza has become irretrievably mundane, they promptly re-exoticize it—with pineapple or passion fruit or whatever passes for flair at the time. They can then spend the rest of their lives spending the rest of their lives—never running the risk of running a risk.

—The Professor , XXV