This past Sunday afternoon my wife Leanne turned on the TV, and to my great delight one of my favourite movies of all time came on, Thе Tіmе Machine, by H.G. Wells. It's a story of a driven young scientist who is fascinated by the mysterious phenomenon of time and who invents a machine which can transport him through it. It's the kind of film made popular in the Sixties by prolific producer Gеоrgе Pаl, one which begins in the plush comfort of a Victorian drawing room, and soon has the hero on an adventure so grand in scale that it almost defies imagination.

I, myself, was thrown back in time, by Thе Tіmе Machine. When I was a child I lived for Sunday afternoon movies like this one. The heros were always driven to go beyond what was known by the men of their time. Comfort and tradition were of little interest to them; excitement, exploration and discovery were everything to them. Yet the romantic and glamourous production values of these films left one with the distinct impression that their heroes were men who wanted to open the clockworks of the universe but be back in time for tea.

I think this type of film is responsible for capturing my spirit as a boy, and for inspiring most of my accomplishments as a man. I've always had a great desire to do something important and, of course unprecedentedly daring, something so huge that most people would never even dream it was possible. This emotion was responsible for my desire as a child to be an astronaut, long before men had ever landed on the moon. It drove me to reinvent the light bulb at 10 (a century too late, unfortunately), to design a perpetual motion machine at 12 (it never really worked), and a submarine at 13 (only in miniature mind you). It is also responsible for my quest as a young adult to discover the inner workings of female beauty - the most difficult of any of my undertakings to date.

I began the way anyone would, I suppose. Lacking any way into the heads of others I had to look at my own reactions to female beauty in order to figure it out. My quest took the form of a question: Why did I want a beautiful woman? What was it about them that made me want one so badly?

I have to point out here that in the beginning, I saw this as a mystical quest, not a scientific one. 15 obligatory and distasteful years in the public school system had - quite unfortunately - taught me that Reason was a waste of time. (This is usually the only thing public schools do manage to teach anyone.)

So it was that I came to invent all sorts of mystical constructs to explain the beauty I saw in women. I saw their beauty as a great but mysterious force of nature, able to drive men to any height of passion, their marvellous breasts capable of inspiring irresistable sexual desire, even in the odd event that the woman had no arms. At one point I even suggested that women shot rays of energy out of their nipples like some sort of futuristic Flеsh Gоrdоn heroines, rays that rendered men doe-eyed and helpless. One thing I knew for sure: female beauty was a bizarre, and wondrous thing.

But like the alchemists of old who pursued an equally strange & beguiling mistress, the Phіlоsоphеr's Stоnе (a mythical element that would turn lead into gold), I eventually became frustrated and distraught. The great mystery of female beauty seemed to elude me as it had eluded everyone since the beginning of time. I began to take solice in that fact. Perhaps, I was trying to do something that really was impossible after all. Perhaps female beauty really was an impenetrable mystery - a phenomenon beyond man's grasp, like God, or the shape of the universe.

I refused to believe it. My year as a born-again Christian, and my discovery in my mid-teens that God was just a word for the feeling people get when they all act like they love each other - a feeling, a high, a drug like any other, a word to explain what people have no desire to understand - had convinced me that God is a delusion. But I refused to believe that female beauty was some unknowable and barren 'higher' power. So I tried again.

Like the ancient alchemist dragging himself down to his laboratory for one more experiment, I went back to the question: What was it about a woman's beauty that made me want it? I'd spent years looking for some causal quality in beautiful women themselves, and had gotten nowhere. So I changed my focus. I looked to the second part of the question, the part about my wanting it. The result was like an accidental laboratory explosion.

It hit me then that I'd been asking the question wrong - I'd been asking it wrong all along, backwards in fact. It was then that the answer came to me: "We do not want beautiful women because they are beautiful," I reasoned, "they are beautiful because we want them."

Wow! It was so simple. Something about wanting beautiful women is what actually makes them beautiful to us. There is no causal quality in them, no energy rays eminating from their bodies, it is wanting them, or wanting something in them, that has been making beautiful women beautiful to me, and to everyone else, all along.

A complete explanation of the 'mystery' of female beauty was then within my grasp. All that remained to be identified was what it was that beautiful women had that people wanted. It wasn't hard to discover what it was. Invariably beautiful women possess youth, mature bodies, vigour, femininity, health, prettiness, charisma, intelligence, purpose, benevolence, sweetness, passion, pride, confidence, sophistication, and reason. At least the women I find beautiful do. The women other people find attractive, although I do not, also possess the things their admirers want. Thus we can say with certainty that female beauty is the representation in a woman of what we want - of our values, if you will, nothing more, and nothing less.

So there it is. My Tіmе Machine, my clockworks exposed, my greatest discovery and humblest gift to humanity: the inner mechanism of female beauty.

Now, where's that cup of tea?