I found the section “The Sacred Silent Language” within Mitchell’s essay, Imperial Landscape, to be the most interesting and thought provoking part of the essay. I didn’t really understand his point that landscape is used as a “medium of exchange” until his example using the value of real estate. Placing a monetary value on every desirable piece of land perverts the “ideal landscape” when considering how people consume landscape. This emphasis of valuing landscape in monetary terms brings up the idea that our current societal structure has more or less made landscape its most valuable commodity. Mitchell points out that we can exhaust every natural resource within a given landscape, but still place a numerical value on it. In this sense, it seems logical that empires past and present have used the acquisition of land as a means of expressing power. The quote, “Empires move outward in space as a way of moving forward in time,” is relevant to our class and our discussions on how space and time are linked together (Mitchell, 170). People use the concept of inhabiting a space to enhance one’s sense of self, but Mitchell goes a step further and says that people also use space and landscape to gather wealth and express it to others. It is this that affirms the idea that, as Emerson says, viewing landscape is never really free, and is inextricably linked to “economic considerations” (Mitchell, 169).