Sophistication

People become sophisticated (about books or foods or foreign countries, about love) perhaps finally in order to lord it over other people, but at first because they are polymorphously perverse, and want to see what each new pleasure will do for them. Yet our sophistication revenges itself against us, so that our libido or fund of Eros, detached too often from its objects, won't settle onto anything again, a condition known as boredom, at least before it sheers into despair. The terror is that our freedom and creativity will become their opposites, and that in kicking away obstacles we end up wrestling with empty space.