Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen. Read the Review. I wrote this book because over the last half century I have often wondered whether I dreamt my past or if someone has been dreaming it for me. The answer came to me during a trip to Hungary, to show my wife the town where I was born and educated. During the seemingly interminable flight, I fell into the kind of receptive haze that can be produced by a solitary prison cell or long hours of jet vibrations--both experiences with which I am painfully familiar.
In my flight-trance, I was walking along Palotai Street, near our family home in the ancient town of Szekesfehervar, and suddenly I was stopped by a bright-looking young man who mumbled something about wanting to talk to me. Without waiting for an answer, he adjusted his steps to mine with great ease. I didn't feel like talking to anyone and I tried, politely, to get rid of him, but he just kept walking with me. Suddenly he looked at me intently with his slanted blue eyes and said, "Do you remember when you were my age?
What happened? He continued, "During sleepless nights, you hoped to emulate Alberti, the archetypal Renaissance man whose life encompassed a half-dozen disciplines, including music, writing, philosophy, and painting and who, at the same time, indulged in the more earthy pleasures of life.
I finally found my voice and said defiantly, "I did learn and practice six different disciplines, and like him I tried to re-create myself through the power of my mind. Whereupon he looked bemused, just as I do when confronted with sophistry.
By this time, I was trying to get away from the odd, mesmerizing stranger, yet I followed him because I was stunned at how much he knew about me. He turned to me and said, "In your thirties you were obsessive; in your forties you spent too much time on making it; in your fifties you didn't believe in anything with the possible exception of yourself, and now, in your sixties, you are like a ship without sail or rudder, on the vast ocean, whose captain has forgotten where he came from and where he is going.
