All I’m saying about that line is, what we do, why we make ourselves mercilessly victims of our own judgments—rightly so—is that when we develop some domination of technique, the higher you climb, the better the view looks, with the devil next to you. Technically, the more you ascend, the more the temptations are there. In Auden poem’s “In Praise of Limestone,” he says, “to ruin a fine tenor voice for effects that bring down the house.” There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing.

Derek Walcott, in “Purple Prose”