above all the freedom from everything coerced, from all coercion and calculation, from all mistaking of time, of the moment whose time has come. For how else than in the sense of this essential suffering could someone from afar surmise the god, where it is said of god:

The reflective god hates all untimely growth.¹

After what we briefly said earlier about Hölderlin in connection with the task of reflecting on the beginning, it is certainly not an accident that we are referring to the poet in order to elucidate what we mean by "suffering" as the essential form of the carrying out of the necessity.

1) Τέχνη as the basic attitude toward φύσις, where the preservation of the wondrous (the beingness of beings) unfolds and is established. Τέχνη maintains the holding sway of φύσις in unconcealedness.

The sustaining of the compelling basic,disposition, as the carrying out of the necessity, is a suffering in the sense indicated, and that is the essence of thoughtful questioning. In such suffering there occurs a correspondence to what has to be grasped, while the one who grasps is transformed according to it. "According to it": that means that what is to be grasped (here, beings as such in their beingness) constrains the one who is grasping, constrains him to a basic position, in virtue of which the pure acknowledgment of the unconcealedness of beings can unfurl. The one who is grasping and perceiving must accord with what is to be grasped so that the latter, beings themselves, are indeed grasped, though in such a way that thereby they are precisely released to their own essence, in order to hold sway in themselves and thus to pervade man as well. Beings, which the Greeks call φύσις, must stand in ἀλήθεια. Here we again touch what is most concealed: that the grasping is a suffering.

How else could we understand the extent to which the two greatest and most renowned thinkers of the early Greek period,

1. Ibid., p. 218.