Captured by the Ottoman fleet while sailing from Venice, a young Italian scholar talks his way out of execution by claiming to be a doctor. In seventeenth-century Istanbul he's given to Hoja, a Turkish scholar who looks uncannily like him and demands he teach him everything—astronomy, medicine, the whole of Western knowledge—in exchange for freedom.
Great passion begins when we imagine that someone who intrigues us has access to a way of living we don't know. Because that life is hidden, it seems all the more attractive, and we come to believe we will only start truly living through them. The desire is partly for the person and partly for the unknown life we picture behind them.
What people praise as an individual style may be nothing more than an imperfection that gives away whose hand made the work. The distinctive mark is not a deliberate achievement. It is the error the maker could not avoid.
While living through events, people often believe life is a chain of coincidences with nothing settled in advance. Looking back, even those same people come to see the accidents as inevitable. The sense of fate is something we add once the story is over, not something we feel along the way.
Trying to write down "why I am what I am" pushes people to list what others did wrong to them. An honest account also has to include their own faults and small private weaknesses. Self-knowledge depends on whether you will look at your own flaws as hard as you look at other people's.
When two people tell each other everything about themselves over many years, they can become hard to tell apart in thought and even in appearance. Others start to wonder how much of one is really the other. Knowing someone's deepest secrets raises the question of whether two people could actually swap who they are.