The oldest form of travel requires no ticket. You open the book and you are elsewhere — not as a tourist but as a resident of the sentence, walking streets that were built for you by someone who died before you were born. Reading is the only teleportation we have, and it is smoother than any machine could manage.
What makes it travel rather than mere information is the body. The reader's body stays in the chair, but the attention — the whole sensory imagination — goes. You come back from a long book the way you come back from a long journey: slightly disoriented, slightly changed, carrying things you did not pack.
We have crossed continents in armchairs and centuries in libraries. We have been cold in Siberian novels and hungry in war memoirs and in love in poems written in languages we barely understood. The book is the vehicle; the reader is the passenger and, if the book is good, the destination as well.
