Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

Even new methods are designed in the moment, and the many moods that come of man and their minds. Even when travelling in time, we cannot influence the mood of the city, nor ask it to. We don’t breathe the air they breathe; we are only observing in the vast existence.

We turn a corner, and the landscape changes, and with it, people and their moods. People don’t just exist in time; they exist in local emotional climates.

To speak of weather, but can weather understand mood? No, it’s not about that; it’s about how mood influences time, invention, progress, regression, understanding, and how morality and justice are always late. In retrospect, emotion shapes events after they’ve already begun to rewrite us. They arrive after the event has already unfolded its consequences into lived experience.

We only need one clear day, a change of landscape, for inventions to manifest and gain new meaning. It’s not only the weather but also the land that shapes mood; the possibilities are endless and not bespoke for us. For mood, as you say, is not a feeling, but the collective—so why do we walk in opposite directions trying to be the first to create the same, yet for a different purpose, with an avaricious moral?

It is in the delay that a lot of human suffering hides, and where mood can become gloomy, as understanding only comes after the time traveller has left.

And then there are the heavy sleepers who walk through their lives but don’t shape them; yet they are part of the mood in the city. It makes you wonder if there is an atmosphere that can only be sensed by the awake, not the superior. They again experience a different atmosphere, yet the mood doesn’t change. Yet at every time, man and mood have their own limits on what can be perceived or imagined.

Then what does it mean for the time traveller? Is life indeed relative to time?

Observation does not absolve. Participation does not guarantee virtue. Accountability persists anyway, as we are all faces in the crowd with our own atmospheres.

©Elke T.B. Stevens 16/04/2026