the gods? It means to be at disposal for use in the opening up of this open realm. The hardest used are those who must first determine in advance-and make their own the disposition toward-the openness of this open realm by inventively thinking the essence of truth and questioning it. At the "disposal of the gods" means to stand far away and outside—i.e., outside the common way of understanding and interpreting "beings"—and to belong to the most distant ones, those to whom the absconding of the gods in the gods' farthest withdrawal is what is closest.
We are already moving, though only transitionally, in another truth (in the more originarily transformed essence of "true" and "correct").
The grounding of this essence does assuredly require exertions of thought, as they had to be carried out only at the first beginning of Western thinking. These exertions are strange to us, because we surmise nothing of what is required to master that which is simple. People today, who are hardly worth the mention, even in a turn away from them, are indeed excluded from the knowledge of the way of thought; they flee to "new" contents and, by bringing in the "political" and the "racial," supply themselves with previously unknown trimmings for the old gear of academic philosophy.
People glory in the shallow pools of "lived experiences" and are unable to measure up the broad structure of the space of thought and are unable to think, in such an opening, the depth and height of beyng. Whenever persons believe themselves superior to shallow "lived experience," what they are invoking is merely an empty sagacity.
Then from what is the education into essential thinking supposed to come? From an anticipatory thinking of the decisive paths and from traveling on them.
Who, for instance, joins in traveling the long path of the grounding of the truth of beyng? Who surmises anything of the necessity of thinking and questioning, that necessity which requires neither the crutches of the "whence" nor the supports of the "whither"?
The more necessary is the thoughtful speaking about beyng, the more unavoidable becomes reticence regarding the truth of beyng in the course of questioning.
The poet, more easily than others, veils the truth in images and presents it that way to the gaze for preservation.
Yet how does the thinker shelter the truth of beyng, if not in the ponderous slowness of the course of questioning steps and their attendant consequences? How otherwise than inconspicuously, the way the sower, in an isolated field, under the vast heaven, paces off the furrows with a heavy, halting, ever-hesitant step while measuring and configuring, with the scattering gesture of the arm, the