“Patmos has been in my mind since I was a little kid,” says Kevin Brine. One of his family friends was Time art critic Alexander Eliot, a passionate Hellenophile who had worked with Brine’s mother, Ruth Brine, the magazine’s first and, for many years, only female senior editor. Another Time colleague had been Robert Lax, who went on to become an acclaimed poet and settled on the island in the early 1960s and whose niece happened to be a friend of Brine’s. So some 20 years ago, when another friend—Ashton Hawkins, the former executive vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—announced that he would be selling his Patmos getaway, furnished and located right below the Byzantine monastery of St. John the Theologian, what else could the Wall Street executive turned scholar, artist, and writer do?