Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors ultimately forgotten?
“‘It isn’t espionage,’ had been, and still was, spoken more out of petulance than any desire to establish purity of motive. He wished it could all be as respectable and orthodox as spying. But somehow in his hands the traditional tools and attitudes were always employed toward mean ends: cloak for a laundry sack, dagger to peel potatoes; dossiers to fill up dead Sunday afternoons; worst of all, disguise itself not out of any professional necessity but only as a trick, simply to involve him less in the chase, to put off some part of the pain of dilemma on various ‘impersonations.’”
Thomas Pynchon | V.