In the development of a culture you get more and more genteel until you’ve out-genteeled everybody. Also in a religion: you can get more and more profound, or even more and more saintly until you’ve out-sainted everybody. And then nobody can understand you, nobody can follow you. So you’re left all in the little world of your own playing this game.
Let’s take, for example, cooking—a subject on which I have extremely authoritative prejudices. You can get so way out in refined sauces, and you can get into such incredible arguments about French wines and their comparable merits, and you can become a wine snob to the nth degree, until finally somebody suggests an entirely new approach, which is a very, very far out group of gourmets who are really hung up on water. You know? Water! It’s just the most beautiful substance! And all these people have so ruined their palates with these excessively refined foods, they can’t taste water anymore. And so the real in-school are the people who can taste water, see?
When you have had every kind of pleasure, and you’ve been able to own everything you ever wanted, and to go everywhere you ever wanted and so on, you have to come back from all that to the realization of how marvelous it is just to exist.