Our slow periods. – This is how all artists and people of ‘works’ feel, the motherly type: at every chapter of their lives – which is always marked by a work – they always think they’ve reached their goal; they would always patiently take death with the feeling ‘we are ripe for it’. This is not the expression of weariness – rather that of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness that the work itself, the fact that the work has become ripe, always leaves behind in its creator. Then the pace of life slows down and becomes thick and flows like honey – to the point of a long fermata,49 of the faith in the long fermata.