Vehicle.

My sense of what literature can be, my reverence for the practice of literature as a vocation, and my identification of the vocation of the writer with the exercise of freedom – all these constituent elements of my sensibility are inconceivable without the books I read in translation from an early age. Literature was mental travel: travel into the past…and to other countries. (Literature was the vehicle that could take you anywhere.) And literature was criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.

Susan Sontag