forever subordinating one’s fundamental decency and devotion to the public thing and good sense to the necessities of the Establishment and the requirements of careerism. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he retains, until a late date, the faculty of justifying these indispensable sacrifices in his immediate assignment, but progressively loses the faculty of justifying them in retrospect—so that, as he moves from bureaucratic area to bureaucratic area, realizing he can never go back because he is fed up, he runs out of areas in which he can justify them in prospect.
Angus at the end of the book, in fine, has his belly full of all the careers in sight. He has been in the high places of American institutional life, and knows in his heart that they stink to high heaven, that they are full of dishonesty and corruption and incompetence, that the social gatherings frequented by their incumbents put their highest premium on shallowness and insincerity, and that they drain a man of his capacity for living a full and rounded and meaningful life.
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