In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that she remembers best “the things that happened the week after next” [1]. Alice is both confused and fascinated, as the White Queen challenges, even turns around, her taken-for-granted notion of time. In linear time, which develops from the past through the present to the future, one can only have memory of what has already happened in the past. The notion of memory of a future moment seems to imply a time that unfolds in the opposite direction, from the future to the past. Fantastical as this notion may be, it keeps appearing in various contexts, as dozens of books and films on time travel bear witness. In the article abstracted here, I draw attention to the theory of “reverse time” in the visual arts of Russian philosopher, mathematician and priest Pavel Florensky (1882–1937). I suggest that...

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