253. What is last

is what not only needs the longest ante-cedence [Vor-läuferschaft] but what itself is the most profound beginning rather than a cessation, the beginning which reaches out the furthest and catches up to itself with the greatest difficulty.

What is last is therefore withdrawn from all calculation and for that reason must be able to bear the burden of the loudest and most repeated misinterpretation. How else could it remain what is surpassing?

If we have such a poor grasp even of "death" in its extremity, then how will we ever measure up to the rare intimation of the last god?

254. Refusal

We are moving into the time-space of the decision regarding the absconding and advent of the gods. How so? Will the absconding or the advent become a future occurrence? Must the one or the other determine the constructive waiting? Or is the decision the opening up of an entirely different time-space for a (indeed the very first) grounded truth of beyng, i.e., for the event?

What if that domain of decision as a whole, the absconding or advent of the gods, were precisely the ending itself? What if, over and above that, beyng in its truth had to be grasped for the first time as appropriation, as the eventuating of that which we call refusal?

That is neither absconding nor advent, and also not absconding as well as advent; instead, it is something originary, the fullness of the bestowal of beyng in the refusal. Therein is grounded the origin of the future style, i.e., restraint within the truth of beyng.

The refusal is the highest nobility of bestowal and is the basic trait of the self-concealment whose manifestness constitutes the originary essence of the truth of beyng. Only in this way does beyng become estrangement itself, the stillness of the passing by of the last god.

But Da-sein is appropriated, in beyng, as the grounding of the stewardship of this stillness.