"I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don't know why"
About this Quote
A confession of cultural lateness that doubles as a flex about seriousness. When Robert Caro admits he never saw a ballet until 45 - and then shrugs, "I don't know why" - he’s not staging ignorance so much as revealing the tunnel vision that can come with a certain kind of ambition. Caro is the biographer who made power legible by living inside archives, zoning in on the machinery of cities and the moral weather of politicians. Ballet, by comparison, is refinement, leisure, the sort of high-art fluency that signals you’ve made room for beauty not immediately convertible into evidence.
The genius of the line is its plainness. There’s no self-exoneration, no claim of being "too busy", no populist contempt for elite culture. The absence of an explanation is the point: it suggests how habits form not through ideology but through inertia. You build a life around what feels necessary, and years later you discover whole continents you simply never visited.
Context matters here. Caro came up from a working-class New York background and built a career on exhaustive reporting - a profession that quietly punishes anything that looks like distraction. The offhand "I don't know why" reads like an honest alarm bell: if someone as disciplined as Caro can miss an entire art form for decades without a narrative reason, then "taste" isn’t just preference. It’s a map drawn by class, work, and the stories we tell ourselves about what counts.
The genius of the line is its plainness. There’s no self-exoneration, no claim of being "too busy", no populist contempt for elite culture. The absence of an explanation is the point: it suggests how habits form not through ideology but through inertia. You build a life around what feels necessary, and years later you discover whole continents you simply never visited.
Context matters here. Caro came up from a working-class New York background and built a career on exhaustive reporting - a profession that quietly punishes anything that looks like distraction. The offhand "I don't know why" reads like an honest alarm bell: if someone as disciplined as Caro can miss an entire art form for decades without a narrative reason, then "taste" isn’t just preference. It’s a map drawn by class, work, and the stories we tell ourselves about what counts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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