Martin Heidegger
How far?
Only when it stops, the clock,
with its pendulum swinging back and forth,
only then do you hear: it goes and is gone and goes
no more.
Already late in the day, the clock,
only a faint track toward time,
which, near finitude,
a-rises from it.
Paths, Paths of thought, going by themselves,
vanishing. When they turn again,
what do they show us?
Paths, going by themselves,
formerly open, suddenly closed,
later on. Once pointing out the way,
never attained, destined to renunciation
slackening the pace
from out of the harmony of trustworthy fate.
And again the need
for a lingering darkness
within the waiting light.
The more insistent the calculators,
the more measure-less the society.
The fewer the thinkers,
the lonelier the poets.
The needier the divining ones.
divining the distance
of the saving hints.
Those who think the same
in the richness of its selfsameness,
travel the laboriously long paths
into the ever more single, the simple
whose location withdraws itself
into the inaccessible.
The reflective composure, the earnest
tranquility of the figure of the old gardener
Vallier, who cultivated the inconspicuous
all along the chemin des Lauves.
In the later work of the painter, the duality
of what is present and presence becomes one.
"realized" and overcome at the same time,
transformed into a mysterious identity.
Is a path revealed here which would lead to
a belonging together of poetry and thought?
Let the saying of a thought, exposed
to the un-precedented, rest in the tranquility
of its rigor.
Thus those who are needed in the
event of a poor prelude will - only rarely - dare
to sing songs which only poets sings, long
unheard.
The duality of songs and thoughts
Springs from a single trunk:
Giving thanks to the sudden hints
From the darkness of fate.
Giving thanks announcing one's belonging to
the needy, appropriating event.
How far the path before this location, from which
thought can appropriately think against
itself, in order to thereby save
the reserve of its poverty.
But what is poor serenely guards its humbleness,
whose unspoken legacy is
greatly preserved in memory:
Saying Ἀλήθεια as: the clearing:
the revealing of sell-withdrawing power.
Martin Heidegger - Gedachtes/Thoughts.
Originally published in René Char: Cahiers de l'Herne. English translation by Keith Hoeller.