Domesticities

It was early evening when my journey began.  The train was full, but not yet uncomfortably full, of people going home.  It is important to insist - you will see why in a moment - that I was under no illusion about them.  If anyone had asked me whether I supposed them to be specially good people or specially happy or specially clever, I should have replied with a perfectly truthful No.  I knew quite well that perhaps not ten percent of the homes they were returning to would be free, even for that one night, from ill temper, jealousy, weariness, sorrow or anxiety, and yet - I could not help it - the clicking of all those garden gates, the opening of all those front doors, the unanalysable home smell in all those little halls, the hanging up of all those hats, came over my imagination with all the caress of a half-remembered bit of music.  There is an extraordinary charm in other people's domesticities.  Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else's garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.

C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns, "Hedonics", 1986

(1st published in Time and Tide, 16 June 1945)