Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Caro

There’s a deceptively simple hunger in Caro’s line: not for novelty as status, but novelty as oxygen. Coming from the great anatomist of power and persistence - the biographer who made “doing the work” feel like an ethical position - it lands less like a lifestyle tip and more like a confession about aging without surrender. He isn’t praising ballet as high culture; he’s praising it as a machine that still produces first times.

The line’s quiet trick is how it reframes “new” from consumer choice to existential scarcity. When you’re young, newness is ambient: new cities, jobs, loves, identities. Later, routine hardens into a kind of protective armor, and with it comes the subtle dread that your future will be mostly repeats. Caro acknowledges that dread without melodrama, then offers a practical counterspell: seek an art form that can still surprise you.

The specificity of “new ballets” matters. Ballet is stereotyped as a museum piece - swans, tutus, the canon. Caro’s point is that even the most tradition-bound form can become a portal if you encounter it at the right time, with the right openness. There’s also a writer’s subtext: fresh perception is fuel. For someone who has spent decades reconstructing history from archives and interviews, “a new experience” isn’t leisure; it’s a way to keep the senses from dulling, to stay porous enough to notice what power does and what people endure.