Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. Enviromentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of imagination, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, celebrity crises.

— Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit (Page 289)