The moving finger writes

“FUGIT inreparabile tempus.” Time flies irretrievably. But why? The question of why time flies; why it has direction; why, in other words, you cannot remember the future, is one of the most profound there is. Indeed, it is so profound that few would even think to ask it of reality. It is, though, asked all the time in fiction. Since H.G. Wells’s novel “The Time Machine” was published in 1895, writers and dramatists have grappled with the possibility of actively travelling through time rather than merely being swept along by it. As the success of things like the BBC’s long-running serial “Doctor Who”—in which the hero travels in a time machine called a Tardis, whimsically stuck in the shape of a police telephone box—attests, that thought is one which has engaged audiences ever since.