... an hour at all. It has no knowable dimension. 'All distances, all measurements, alter for the one who becomes solitary', especially the measurement of time: 'a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree ...' Creative life contains its own temporality and the surest way to make it fail is to put it on an external clock. Mechanical time makes haste, as it were, but haste dissolves in solitude. In solitude we feel 'as if eternity lay before' us.