I noted a couple of weeks ago that I would write some posts as I read through Present Concerns (a collection of articles by C.S. Lewis). This is my first attempt.
The article entitled Hedonics recounts a particular trip to London taken by C.S. Lewis. As one who never lived in London, much of the city remained a mystery to him. With this being the case, on this particular trip, he was unexpectedly swept away, as it were, by the simple romance of travel.
As he rode on the underground train, observing his fellow-passengers, he writes,
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 per cent 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.
Lewis’ imagination had come under the spell of the mysteriousness and magic of…the human race – other people. He continues,
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.
Lewis describes other experiences from this trip, but I can’t spoil the whole thing. Let me comment on the above quotes.
As I read this article, I found myself agreeing with Lewis. But I also found myself amazed that I had never seen it in quite this way. We all know what it is like to walk into a strange home. When you walk into a house in which you have never been, there is a certain magic about it – only we don’t recognize it as magic. There are so many memories stored in such houses, such life has been, and is, lived there. So many stories, so many smells, so many relics are present. It can be, and often is, like walking into a new world. We are like Alice or Dorothy. Or, more appropriately, we are like the Pevensies, only instead of walking through a wardrobe, we are simply walking through the front door. Perhaps we would care more for fellowship in unknown houses if we saw the front door as a door to another world.
To those on the other side of the door, the house is simply home. The smell is always the same. But to those on the outside, it is a different story.’ Every lighted house,’ he says, ‘seen from the road, is magical.’ Every lighted house marks the portal into an unknown world. It is like the technicolor of Oz in the midst of a black night, if we have eyes to see.
And to think that our own homes are unknown worlds to those on the outside. Yet we don’t invite them in. But I digress.
Lewis concludes the article the by asserting that pleasure in the ‘little things’ of life, such as a visit to a strange city, or a strange house, though perhaps small pleasures, are pleasures nonetheless. And these are pleasures that should be valued. Lewis believed that the hardness of the world, and the pompous desire to be ‘grown up’ could fight off such pleasures. Our job therefore is to accept the offer of such small pleasures. He wrote of the joy he had experienced that night:
They did not actually impose this happiness; they offered it. I was free to take it or not as I chose – like distant music which you need not listen to unless you wish, like a delicious faint wind on your face which you can easily ignore. One was invited to surrender to it. And the odd things is that something inside me suggested that it would be ‘sensible’ to refuse the invitation; almost that I would be better employed in remembering that I was going to do a job I do not greatly enjoy and that I should have a very tiresome journey back to Oxford. Then I silenced this inward wiseacre. I accepted the invitation – threw myself open to this feathery, impalpable, tingling invitation. The rest of the journey I passed in a state which can be described only as joy.
We would all find much more joy on our journey if we did the same more often.
On a side note, this is one of the most moving bits of Lewis I have ever read. I would suggest that you pick up Present Concerns for this article alone. It is little nuggets like this short essay that make me continue to read him. It seems that every time I read him his words cause me to wake up to the life that is all around me.
