The ones who go down in the essential sense are those who run beneath what is coming (the futural) and sacrifice themselves to it as its future invisible ground: the steadfast ones who perpetually expose themselves to questioning.
Only those who belong can know the era of down-going. All others must fear the down-going and thus deny and renounce it, for to them it is sheer weakness and mere ending.
Those who truly go down have no acquaintance with bleak "resignation" (which no longer wills, since it does not will anything future) and just as little with noisy "optimism" (which, despite all the self-assurance, still does not genuinely will, since it blocks itself against willing beyond itself and against attaining itself only in transformation).
Those who go down are always questioning. The un-rest of questioning is not empty uncertainty; instead, it is the opening-up and guarding of that rest which, as the gathering together into what is most question-worthy (the event), awaits the simple intimacy of the call and endures the extreme wrath of the abandonment by being.
Questioning into the essence of truth and into the essential occurrence of beyng: what else is this but resoluteness for extreme meditation? Yet this resoluteness grows out of openness for the necessity that makes unavoidable the experience of the plight of the abandonment by being. The experience of this plight, however, depends in turn on how powerful memory is or, in general, on how dominant knowledge is.
Questioning of this sort is the restraint of seeking out where and in what way the truth of being might be grounded and sheltered.
Seeking is never simply a matter of not yet possessing, deprivation. To understand it in that sense is to calculate it merely in terms of the result to be attained. Primarily and properly, seeking is an advancing into the domain in which truth opens itself or withholds itself. Seeking is intrinsically futural and is a coming into the nearness of being. Seeking brings the seekers to themselves for the first time, i.e., brings them into the selfhood of Da-sein, wherein the clearing and concealment of beings occur.
Being a self is the finding that already lies in the seeking, the sure illumination which already gleams prior to all veneration and in virtue of which alone we are open for the resonating of what is most unique and greatest.