Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Caro

A biographer famous for power politics lets himself be ambushed by wonder. Caro’s line lands because it treats a single aesthetic moment with the same seriousness he usually reserves for elections, backroom deals, and institutional machinery. “The moment the curtain rose” is stage-direction precise, a reporter’s timestamp that makes revelation feel verifiable. Then he swerves: not “I enjoyed it,” but “something wonderful and new had come into my life.” The passive phrasing matters. The experience arrives unbidden, like history itself does in Caro’s books - forces entering a room and rearranging the furniture of a person’s future.

Naming Divertimento No. 15 (Balanchine’s ballet set to Mozart) is not flexing taste; it’s anchoring epiphany in specificity. Caro is a writer who distrusts vagueness. He wants the reader to understand that transformative art isn’t a mood, it’s an address you can return to. “I can still see the first scene” carries the subtext of durability: decades of looking at documents and interviewing witnesses have taught him that memory is slippery, yet this image persists with archival clarity. The implied argument is quietly radical: beauty can be an origin story, as consequential as any political conversion.

Contextually, it’s also a glimpse of how Caro builds stamina for the long haul. Ballet here isn’t an escape from his subject matter; it’s a counterweight to it, proof that a life spent anatomizing ambition still has room for awe, discipline, and form.