Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Look not mournfully into the past it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.

No failure in America whether of love or money is ever simple it is always a kind of betrayal of a mass of shadowy shared hopes.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins?