Parenting & Family Quote by Ned Rorem

Rorem’s line is a polite provocation with a blade inside it: adulthood, as we’re taught to perform it, is basically a deal to trade sensitivity for social fluency. He frames “growing up” not as maturing but as sanding down the very surfaces where art catches light. The word “arguably” is doing real work here, a composer’s version of a raised eyebrow. He’s not issuing a manifesto so much as daring you to notice how often “be realistic” is code for “stop feeling so much.”

The hinge is “perceptions of childhood.” Not childishness, not ignorance, but that pre-cynical way of seeing: disproportionate awe, quick tenderness, a willingness to take small things personally and large things literally. Rorem suggests the artist’s job is to keep that perceptual wiring intact while everyone else learns to deaden it for efficiency. The subtext is less romantic than it sounds. Childhood perception can be inconvenient, even embarrassing. It gets you hurt. It also keeps you curious, which is the fuel for composition: hearing ordinary sounds as if they’re newly invented, trusting intuition before explanation arrives.

Context matters: Rorem spent his career defending clarity, lyricism, and personal candor against mid-century pressures toward system, theory, and approved seriousness. This quote reads like a rebuttal to the idea that “real” art requires grown-up austerity. For him, sophistication isn’t the opposite of childhood; it’s childhood with craft. The tragedy isn’t that we age. It’s that we learn to stop noticing.