When I set out for the United Sates, and also throughout my travels there, I swore that I would never write a book on America (there are already so many!). Now, however, I have changed my mind. Travel books are a useful, modest and yet self-contained way of writing literature. These are books that have a practical use, even though, or precisely because, countries change from year to year and in fixing them as you have seen them you record their changing essence; and in such books you can express something that goes beyond the description of places one has seen, a relationship between yourself and reality, a process of knowledge.