"I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet"
About this Quote
Caro’s line lands like a small confession from a man famous for the opposite impulse: the biographer as grinder-down of mysteries, the patron saint of exhaustive knowing. “Deliberately” is the tell. This isn’t ignorance; it’s discipline. He’s describing a choice to preserve a certain kind of attention - the uncredentialed, first-order experience that expertise can quietly sterilize.
The subtext is a warning about how competence can become a filter that blocks the very thing you came to see. In fields like ballet, “expert” doesn’t just mean informed; it often means initiated into a closed vocabulary of correctness: what counts as good footwork, where the tradition says your eyes should go, which names confer legitimacy. Caro’s career is built on mastery of systems - political machines, bureaucracies, power’s paper trail - but he’s also obsessed with what those systems do to human beings. Here, he’s applying that skepticism to taste itself. Becoming an expert might mean becoming less available to wonder, less porous to surprise, more fluent but less moved.
Context matters: Caro writes about power by immersing himself, but he’s not a tourist of other people’s lives. He’s careful about the ethics and psychology of observation. Not becoming a ballet expert can be read as respect for the art’s autonomy (he won’t pretend insiderhood) and as self-protection against the critic’s reflex to reduce a living performance into a checklist. It’s a strategic humility: stay sharp, stay honest, don’t let the badge of expertise become the point.
The subtext is a warning about how competence can become a filter that blocks the very thing you came to see. In fields like ballet, “expert” doesn’t just mean informed; it often means initiated into a closed vocabulary of correctness: what counts as good footwork, where the tradition says your eyes should go, which names confer legitimacy. Caro’s career is built on mastery of systems - political machines, bureaucracies, power’s paper trail - but he’s also obsessed with what those systems do to human beings. Here, he’s applying that skepticism to taste itself. Becoming an expert might mean becoming less available to wonder, less porous to surprise, more fluent but less moved.
Context matters: Caro writes about power by immersing himself, but he’s not a tourist of other people’s lives. He’s careful about the ethics and psychology of observation. Not becoming a ballet expert can be read as respect for the art’s autonomy (he won’t pretend insiderhood) and as self-protection against the critic’s reflex to reduce a living performance into a checklist. It’s a strategic humility: stay sharp, stay honest, don’t let the badge of expertise become the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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