SLSL Intro, Sub Rosa

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Not too pleased with his "old" young self, is he:

        Could Willy Sutton rob a safe? Loot the Baedeker
    I did, all the details of a time and a place I had never
    been to, right down to the names of the diplomatic 
    corps. Who'd make up a name like Khevenhuller-Metsch?
    (Intro, p.17)

cf:

    The pseudepigrapher identifies himself with a former
    age because he believes in the eternal significance of
    his message. Pseudepigraphy is not forgery, but a 
    proclamation of the continuity of a hidden tradition.
    The Kabbalah as a whole, even when it did not engage
    in pseudepigraphy, was metaphorically pseudepigraphical,
    Scholem intimates, because it claimed to be an ancient
    esoteric tradition (*Kabbalah*)...(...) Scholem points out,
    for example, that the fourteenth-century Kabbalists
    may have doubted the Zohar's claim of antiquity without
    for a moment rejecting its veracity. 
    (Gershom Scholem: Kabbala and Counter-History, David
    Biale, Harvard University Press, 1979. p119)

Again,

    Lest others become as enchanted as I was and have
    continued to be with this technique, let me point out
    that it is a lousy way to go about writing a story.(Intro-p17)

right...

respectfully