Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Enders Island is located a few miles from Mystic Seaport. In the first week of May, I spent a rainy eight days there laboring, with some success, to produce three mural frescoes under the guiding hand of Chady Elias, a masterful religious artist who is the Vice President & Dean of Administration at Sacred Art Institute Enders Island  and the Adjunct Professor of Sacred Art at   Holy Apostles College & Seminary  in Cromwell, Connecticut. About the rain: I cannot help mentioning a morning prayer delivered by Sister Eugenia , a Master Catechist, after a sumptuous breakfast before we set out for the studio. It contained the usual appreciation and gratitude for all things large and small, with a slight knock “even though the weather has been not to our liking.”

Dedication -- To My Nieces and Nephews Prologue: A Little Knowledge I want to warn you from the very beginning: A memoir is very much like a confession, and you must be wary of people who write confessions. They are rarely sincere about their failings or themselves in their narratives because they cannot bear to be sincere about themselves in their lives. Everyone quotes Socrates’ famous apothegm: Know thyself. Few are willing to trace his self-knowledge to its bitter end in forced suicide, and fewer still practice what he preached. In the 21 st Century – Your century, my dear nieces and nephews – it may not be necessary to know oneself at all. In any case, perhaps it is better to concentrate on others. My century – the 20 th , the bloodiest in the history of the world, full of introspective maniacs – had its fill of self-regarding “men like gods.”