Anyone who as a boy belongs to the middle class doesn’t even notice the fact, in part because the privileges he enjoys or the privations he suffers aren’t really all that spectacular, in the final analysis; he hardly even imagines that he can qualify as a “bourgeois young man”: when he looks in the mirror he sees a young man, not a “bourgeois young man,” even though that’s exactly what he is and how he actually appears, even when he’s in his underwear he’s a bourgeois young man in his underwear, lifting weights to develop his arm muscles, in front of the mirror in the bathroom of a bourgeois home, etc. But he doesn’t perceive himself that way, at age fifteen or sixteen he hardly thinks that belonging to a class is significant, and most of all he really doesn’t think of himself as belonging to a social class, if anything he might consider the soccer team he roots for, the music that he likes or detests, the way he dresses, or his political beliefs, which, in the case of a middle-class young man, could vary from the extreme right wing to the extreme left without either option seeming odd.

A borgataro from the poorer outskirts of town or an heir to a fortune or the scion of an aristocratic family almost immediately realize who they are and where they come from and where they’re heading or risk heading: the markers along the highways of their lives.

The young bourgeois man, on the other hand, will all at once perceive, on a given day that is as likely to come at age eighteen as at age thirty or forty, the class he belongs to, and in a flash it will become just as evident to his eyes that his clothing, his home, his motorcycle or his car, his very thoughts and desires and the way he has of relishing life or suffering, and even the sweetheart he has chosen or who has chosen him and who might well now be his wife, and have been for some time—all these things are the way they are precisely because he is bourgeois.

From that moment on, no matter what he might be doing, even organizing a picnic or signing an insurance policy or kissing a woman who might or might not be his wife, he’ll be possessed by that awareness. (The Catholic School)