Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Caro

At the ballet, Caro reaches for a word most biographers ration carefully: transcendence. This is a man famous for treating power as something brutally terrestrial - votes counted, favors traded, bodies exhausted, cities remade. So when he describes ballet as "outside the rest of your life", he’s not just praising an art form; he’s admitting a rare escape from the moral weather of his own subject matter. The repetition - "outside... Higher" - feels like a private correction, as if "outside" isn’t strong enough. He wants altitude, not merely distance.

The intent is almost stubbornly physical. Ballet isn’t framed as entertainment or culture-as-status. It’s a sensation of entering a separate climate where time behaves differently and the human body refuses its usual limitations. Caro’s subtext is that everyday life, including the life he chronicles, has a gravitational pull: compromise, routine, ambition, exhaustion. Ballet becomes the opposite of that - not pure in a naive sense, but disciplined into seeming purity. The "higher" isn’t moral superiority; it’s verticality, lift, suspension, the staged miracle of weightlessness.

Context matters because Caro’s entire career is an argument that systems shape souls. Here, he’s confessing that systems don’t get the last word. For a writer who documents how power narrows reality, ballet offers a counter-reality: temporary, crafted, unquestionably human, and still somehow beyond the human day-to-day.