But the shadows will still tarry.
Let us shyly close the day
By heading off, to faraway
Coasts, on wild tributaries.
The shadows are our native ground—
When our exhaustion's most profound,
In the dark' s nightly embrace
We hope to find a slender solace.
With hope, we're able to condone
All our grief and all our horror.
Our lips are voiceless, more and more—
Day breaks without a single tone.
5. Denktagebuch entry by Hannah Arendt
(handwritten), July 1953
[From Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, eds. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann, in cooperation with the Hannah Arendt Institute, Dresden, 2 vols. (Munich-Zurich: Piper, 2002).]
Heidegger says, quite proudly: "People say Heidegger is a fox." This is the true story of Heidegger the fox.
There once was a fox who was so utterly without cunning that he not only constantly fell into traps but could not even distinguish a trap and a nontrap. This fox had another affliction: something was wrong with his fur, so he was completely lacking in natural protection against the rigors of fox life. After this fox had spent his entire youth hanging around in other people's traps and not one piece of his fur was, so to speak, left unscathed, he decided to completely withdraw from the fox world and began to build a den. With his hair-raising ignorance of traps and nontraps and his incredible experience with traps, he arrived at an idea entirely new and unheard of among foxes: he built himself a trap as a fox den, sat down in it, and pretended it was a normal