"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a railway carriage, alone with his thoughts, on a five-hour railway journey between Sydney and Canberra."
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- Blaise Pascal's famous 1654 Pensée, responsibly adapted to meet the Australia of 2026
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In the news there is a renewed spasm of complaints about how long it takes to travel by train between Canberra and Sydney. Those complaints are coupled with calls for a 21st century upgrading of trains and tracks so that the journey between the two cities, presently an old-fashioned saunter, can become a thoroughly modern dash.
ACT senator David Pocock has just been piping up about this, arguing that the present Canberra-to-Sydney journey of 4.5 hours is unbecomingly sluggish, that the federal capital city deserves better. Senator Pocock seethes that federal government funding is needed, now, so that the drawn-out trek is reduced to a gallivant of 90 minutes.
This furore coincides with my own latest railway excursion to and from Sydney. High culture had called me to Sydney for a few days.
Pascal had deplored that we are a feverish species and find it difficult, alarming even, to spend time alone with our thoughts. In the pensée in question he goes on to say that man's impatience with tranquil solitude, his feverish need for teeming action, results in all sorts of "wicked enterprises" including the starting of wars.
Even as I write, my daily New Yorker magazine is diagnosing (Trump's Capricious War) that Trump's attack on Iran is "capricious" and "personal" as if owing something to Trump being a man with no inner-life whatsoever, to his finding peace insufferably tedious.
As it happens I have lots in common with Pascal and so I really enjoyed sitting quietly during last week's contemplatively slow train trips to and from Sydney. The journeys reminded me of Pascal's pensée with its famous insight that "The sole cause of mankind's unhappiness is that man does not know how to stay, quietly, alone in his room."
I like the anachronistic way this particular rail journey is so contrary to the furious pace of everything else in our revved-up lives. All psychotherapeutic counselling tells us that it is good for our mental health for us to be less frantic, to live more mindfully.
In a better, saner society our senators might perhaps be praising the public health benefits of slow trains and agitating for more of them, for the replacement of "bullet" trains with "tortoise" trains.
On the train ambling up to Sydney last week, I sat quietly in Car B, alone with my thoughts. Those thoughts included whether or not Anthony Albanese, given the unAustralian callousness he has shewn to the 11 '"sis brides" and their 23 children (he has snarled that he has "nothing but contempt" for all 34 of them) is emotionally fit to be our prime minister.
Surely, I thought to myself, the compassion-capable members of his parliamentary party (people like the ACT's very own Andrew Leigh MHR) must be ashamed of their leader? Surely they are plotting, now, to replace him with someone who will set the nation a better moral example?
Between Mittagong and Campbelltown, as our hitherto ambling train broke into almost a foxtrot of pace, the rhythmic rumble of the train's wheels seemed to be clickety-clacketly chanting "Albo's a pitiless populist robot/Albo's a pitiless populist robot/He's letting Australia down/He's letting Australia down".
My main purpose in going to Sydney was to go to a performance in the Opera House of Gustav Mahler's mighty Song of the Earth, a meditation on Life's wondrous loveliness, tragic brevity and tragic meaninglessness. I wondered if my fellow Mahler enthusiast Paul Keating, a cultured Labor prime minister of principle and substance and personality (unlike the present pitiless populist robot) was there in the concert hall with us.
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Coming home on the train and quietly alone with thoughts about Song of the Earth and the meaning of life, I fell to noticing and enjoying how our train felt so like a live, wild creature.
Express buses and of course aeroplanes plying between our cities just hurtle straightly, mechanically from A to B. The Canberra-Sydney-Canberra train by contrast seems to wander (as though in search of something or as though lost in thought) and at a variety of paces; a foxtrot here, a gambol there, then a slow Wordsworthian stroll as though taking the time to admire daffodils.
Homeward-bound last week when, rarely, there were any short gatherings of pace, being aboard the train was charmingly like being a rider on a thirsty camel (I imagined myself being one of the Three Wise Men following the star) that had caught an intoxicating scent of water somewhere ahead.
So for example just after Tarago (and how like this delightfully 20th-century train that it stops at God-forsaken but quaint Tarago!) our locomotive-camel seemed to get a scent of water at the next oasis, Bungendore. It broke into a short-lived foxtrot-trundle for about five minutes before it ran out of puff.
Then, panting, it slowed down somewhere where, beside us in the grey bush, playful wombats raced us, jogging beside us just for fun, easily keeping up with us.
What Economy Class joy this gave! What is this world, if, full of care, we travel too fast to just sit and stare?
- Ian Warden is a regular contributor.
