Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows...the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity...mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.

Summary

This quote highlights the opulence and allure of large department stores. It suggests that these stores, with their abundant displays of food and clothing, represent a landscape of wealth and abundance. The crowded streets and flashy store windows create a sense of excitement and desire, stimulating a longing for the luxurious products on offer. The quote also implies that the accumulation of goods in these stores goes beyond their individual value; it symbolizes a world of plenty, an extravagant show of surplus that negates the notion of scarcity. This excessiveness mimics a newfound natural fecundity, invoking a sense of magical fascination.

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