Do you love Canberra's solitude? You're not the Lone Ranger

"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself." - Michel de Montaigne

_____________________________________

Life lived in Australia's quaint and peculiar federal capital city is a mixture of blessings and curses. Today's column looks at one of its unsung blessings, the superabundance, for its citizens, of abundantly-available solitude.

Now a vaunted new semi-scholarly book from Cambridge University Press, Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone, argues that new science confirms what fine thinkers have always thought, that the experience of solitude (a very different beast from painful loneliness) is essential to a rich, insightful, meaningful life.

The book and the discussion it is generating coincides for this columnist with some vivid reminders in recent days of how, with this city's teensy population so lightly sprinkled across this so spacious and so spreadeagled a city, solitude is an unusually abundant quality of Canberra life whether one likes it not.

It is an occasional theme of this column that much of Canberra's hard-to-define-strangeness has to do with it being so relatively people-free. Cities are supposed to teem (it is what cities do). But Canberra simply won't oblige. If one feels the occasional need for a throng they are very, very hard to find in Canberra, a city where people are vastly outnumbered by trees and by cockatoos and parrots.

The readers: "But Ian, what were the 'vivid reminders' you have just tantalised us with a mention of?"

The columnist: Well, already used to having the National Arboretum all to myself on my walks there, to being alone (save for the sparkling company of Joan, my battery-powered tennis ball machine) at my tennis club, to being almost alone (save for my reflections in the wall mirrors) at my gymnasium, I've recently twice been the only person attending a movie in one of Palace Electric's movie theatres.

Being the solitary moviegoer at a movie is at first an eerie experience since surely the essence of theatre-going is that it is a communal thing requiring one to be a member of an audience sharing an entertainment. And yet as well as it being bliss (the two movies were both awful and I was able to loudly jeer at them without risk of annoying anyone) it was a quintessentially Canberraesque experience. A cinema to oneself!

The new book makes firm distinctions between being lonely and being solitary. Having had my mind tuned to these things, I saw and studied true loneliness in action on Monday afternoon. A Canberra Liberals' candidate for October's election was haunting my deserted, arctically-windswept local shops, pining for someone, anyone, even a stray dog, to come up to her.

MORE GREAT READS:

We are used to using the expression "like a shag on a rock" to describe a lonely and isolated soul but an expression "like a Liberal candidate at the shops" would do a better job of capturing the tragedy of a lonely person's loneliness.

Feeling a little sorry for her, a brief flame of Christian charity flickered in my bosom as I thought of going up to Karen (for like most female Liberals, that was her name) to feign interest in her party's nasty little policies. But my brief, untrue-to-my-political-nature flame of kindness was just a candle in the wind and was quickly extinguished.

In a lovely online essay, Alone Again, Unnaturally, prompted by the new book, Joseph Epstein approvingly quotes the philosopher Montaigne.

"Now the aim of all solitude is the same: to live more at leisure and at one's ease. [To achieve this] it is not enough to have got away from the crowd ... we must get away from the gregarious instincts that are inside us, we must sequester ourselves and repossess ourselves ... real solitude may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and the courts of kings; but it is enjoyed more handily alone."

"And the greatest thing in the world," Montaigne adds, "is to know how to belong to oneself."

For me, another vivid and blissful recent experience of unique-to-Canberra solitude came in the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) room displaying Sidney Nolan's quietly wondrous Riverbend. On my visit I was what Montaigne calls "handily alone". I had the room and Riverbend all to myself. I belonged to myself and Riverbend belonged to me. Rapture!

Riverbend is on loan to CMAG.* It is a tremendous nine-panel work showing an elusive Ned Kelly (he is elusive in the paintings, too, and can take some finding) eluding police by hiding among forests of mighty pale-trunked eucalypts along a river's edge.

There is a great Australian bush silence captured in the work and to be able to contemplate it in silent solitude (without the distracting noisiness of a throng) felt somehow perfect, and a privilege.

How wonderful, methought, how very essence-of-Canberra to be able to have a great, great masterpiece all to oneself for as long as one needs to properly, reverently contemplate it.

By contrast, in teeming cities one must queue and jostle with selfie-maddened madding throngs to get one's allotted 30 seconds with a gallery's special treasure.

"Thank you, Mr Nolan. Thank you, Ned. Thank you, CMAG. Thank you, Canberra. Thank you, solitude," I whispered as I left the (still uncontaminated by others) CMAG Nolan room, counting my federal capital citizenship blessings.

*Riverbend is at CMAG until July 28.