The view from a train gives you other people’s ordinary places without their ordinary explanations.

A train shows you the backs of lives with no commentary attached. Gardens, yards, a chair by a shed, a light on in an upstairs room: each is entirely ordinary to whoever lives there and mysterious to you, because you get the scene without the reasons. That mixture of intimacy and ignorance is what makes the window absorbing.

On your next journey, spend one stretch looking out rather than down at your phone. Try imagining the dullest possible explanation for what you see. It will usually be the right one, and it will still be somebody’s whole life.