dwells where everything that gives food for thought is kept in safety. We shall call it the "keeping." It harbors and conceals what gives us food for thought. "Keeping" alone gives freely what is to-be-thought, what is most thought-provoking, it frees it as a gift. But the keeping is not something that is apart from and outside of what is most thought-provoking. The keeping itself is the most thought-provoking thing, itself is its mode of giving—giving itself which ever and always is food for thought. Memory, as the human recall of what must be thought about, consists in the "keeping" of what is most thought-provoking. Keeping is the fundamental nature and essence of memory.
Our attempt to explain memory as no more than a capacity to retain shows that our ideas stop too soon and too restrictively with the immediate data. Memory is not just part of that capacity to think within which it takes place; rather, all thinking, and every appearance of what is to-be-thought, find the open spaces in which they arrive and meet, only where the keeping of what is most thought-provoking takes place. Man only inhabits the keeping of what gives him food for thought—he does not create the keeping.
Only that which keeps safely can preserve—preserve what is to-be-thought. The keeping preserves by giving harbor, and also protection from danger. And from what does the keeping preserve what is to-be-thought? From oblivion. However, the keeping is not compelled to preserve in this manner. It can permit the oblivion of what is most thought-provoking. What is our evidence? The evidence is that what is most thought-provoking, what long since and forever gives us food for thought, remains in its very origin withdrawn into oblivion.
The question then arises how we can have the least knowledge of what is most thought-provoking. More pressing