Future Perfect.

     The future perfect:  It is where the past and the future meet.  It is the tense of one's future self looking on his present self as past.  It is you-now thinking of future-you as being a past-you to another future-you.

     It is the future with a sense of the past.  It entails the consciousness not only of the present and future as distinct entities conceptually, but of the potential of the present to become the past.  One cannot use it without feeling painfully conscious of how deeply embedded he is in his own future past.  It is surely the most relevant tense to a classicist, ever conscious of those poor students who, two thousand years hence, will be laboring over their textbooks of impossibly unphonetic Classical English, when our language will long since have ceased to be spoken. 

The World of the Future Perfect.

PRES.----------FUT.PERF.----------FUT.

The Future.----->  <-----The Past.