Greta Garbo was on to something when she said, “I want to be let alone.” It doesn’t mean lonely, but rather solitude, something we can still find in the increasingly dense GTA.

The ravines are the go-to spot to be alone in nature, but even there it’s difficult to be truly alone; on midnight snowshoe hikes up the Don Valley, I’ve seen footprints in fresh snow, both human and animal.

The Scarborough Bluffs are another place to be alone. I’ve ridden the lakeside path between Bellamy Ravine and Galloway Rd. and not encountered a human being for a few kilometres, remarkable in a region of nearly five million people.

There’s a different kind of being alone that’s particular to big cities though: being alone and anonymous in a crowd, with your own thoughts and observations, without interacting with other people much, if at all. It’s a Garbo kind of alone: being left alone, but not necessarily being lonely. City people get a bad reputation for being cold or indifferent to their surroundings, but when so much of our time is spent in public, and there’s so much going on, it’s self-preservation to block some of the action out. Taking it all in risks sensory overload, an exhilarating condition often best experienced as a tourist rather than everyday.

In the city, sometimes being alone means sitting in a café reading or eating out. It can take a bit of fortitude to not worry people will think your date stood you up, accustomed as we are to being out in groups of two or more.

The best thing about being alone in the city is we’re never really alone. Civilization is always right there. In his 1954 poem “Meditations in an Emergency”Frank O’Hara wrote of the tension between wanting to escape yet not wanting to leave the city: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” In a city we can be alone until we choose not to be alone.

So many of us live in wee little apartments and condos, like people do in cities everywhere. We don’t have backyards, but balconies are good places to be alone. When you look up at all the balconies in the city they usually appear empty. “People don’t use their balconies,” is often heard, as if rates of backyard usage are monitored. Sometimes all an apartment dweller needs are a few minutes alone on their balcony, their own bit of personal outdoor space where they can survey the city and all its life. A balcony is where we can feel a brief command over all the chaos of city life.

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Being alone in public sometimes means wearing earphones. Ignore the sanctimonious person who might tell you to take out your earphones and experience the world. That person is a jerk. Experience as much of the city as you want and to whatever soundtrack you’d like.

The problem is not everybody gets to be alone. Certainly being alone in a ravine at night isn’t appealing for many people. Others are forever having their alone time intruded upon.

Female friends and acquaintances tell story after story of being alone in public and a guy (always a guy) telling them to “smile.” Or, of being alone in a café and having a guy sit at the table with them and start an uninvited one-way conversation. Some complain of being catcalled while walking down the sidewalk. These women say their earphones aren’t just for podcasts and music but are armour, a thin shield to keep unwanted intrusions and harassment at bay.

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Garbo was right; leave people alone. Everybody has the right to be let alone in the city.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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