Time & Perspective Quote by Edwin Way Teale

Teale frames solitude and physical room not as lifestyle luxuries but as endangered resources, and that choice of language is the tell. By borrowing the vocabulary of economics - “scarcity,” “tomorrow” - he treats modern life like a market that quietly reallocates what matters most, often without consent. It’s a calm sentence with a faint alarm bell inside it: we’re not just losing minutes, we’re losing the conditions that make minutes feel like ours.

The hyphenated pairing does double work. “Time to be alone” points to an interior necessity: attention that isn’t interrupted, selfhood that isn’t performed. “Space to move about” stays stubbornly bodily, reminding you that freedom isn’t only mental; it’s also the ability to walk, wander, change scenery, breathe without friction. Teale doesn’t romanticize wilderness so much as warn that the default settings of modernity - density, noise, schedules, surveillance-by-social-expectation - will compress both the mind and the map.

Context matters: Teale wrote as a naturalist and essayist in an America accelerating through suburbia, highways, and mass media, when “progress” often meant more access, more connectivity, more people everywhere. The subtext is a reversal of the usual promise. Convenience doesn’t automatically deliver liberation; it can produce a packed calendar and a crowded world, where being unreachable and unbothered becomes status, not a baseline.

“Tomorrow” lands as indictment and prophecy. If we don’t defend solitude and room, they won’t be taken from us dramatically. They’ll just be priced out, scheduled out, built over.