"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........

© Canberra Times