Obviously, when you are travelling you are travelling to some place, and you want and expect that place to come out to meet you. You want to see your destination prefigured along the way. It could be the first glimpse of a city skyline in the distance, or the first glint of sea through the hills. Wherever you’re going, you are looking forward to a proper reception and part of that reception involves sneak previews of your destination, whether it’s your own front door or some strange new town. That’s part of the pleasure of travelling: enjoying where you are and looking forward to where you’ll be. But you are denied all that when travelling backwards in a train. You never really see where you are; you just see where you’ve been receding in the window. And you never see any prefigurements of where you’ll be; all the anticipation is taking place behind you. Travelling backwards in a train just doesn’t feel right.The B&B where I was staying was on the banks of the River Wye, and my room looked right out onto the thick, swollen river. It had been raining for days and the river was bloated and brown and moving very fast. Periodically tree branches and other debris were swept past, so you could really see how fast the current was moving. Travelling in a train is like being swept up in the current of a river. Heraclitus wrote one of the best aphorisms about rivers, perhaps even one of the best aphorisms about anything:
One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water in which you first stepped has flowed on.
Travelling backwards in a train means not even being able to step into the same river once, because you only see the landscape after it has passed; you don’t feel the water swirling around your toes, you just see it disappearing downriver. I don’t want to have my back to where I’m going. I want to meet my destination head on. I may never pass this way again, so I want to enjoy the moment and I want to see it coming from afar. You get just one chance to dip your toe in the river; might as well make a splash. Floating backwards with the current would just make me sick.