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Our Slow Periods. It is thus that artists feel, and all men of "works," the maternal species of men: they always believe at every chapter of their life - a work always makes a chapter - that they have now reached the goal itself; they would always patiently accept death with the feeling: "we are ripe for it." This is not the expression of exhaustion, - but rather that of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness, which the work itself, the maturing of the work, always leaves behind in its originator. Then the tempo of life slows down - turns thick and flows with honey - into long pauses, into the belief in the long pause...