Walking alone in a city that’s not my own, I think of what Virginia Woolf wished for the women in Cambridge who came to hear her speak in 1928. “By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle,” she said, “to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep in the stream.”

Rosenbloom, Stephanie. Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude (pp. 59-60). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.