the entire history of metaphysics) through the concealment of its seclusion in the unbroached origin but through the clarity of a heavy darkness pertaining to a depth that knows itself and arises in meditation.
The history of metaphysical thinking, and also of the thinking of the historicality of being, eventuates at once in the different eras of these ways of thinking and in accord with different powers of the priority of being over beings, of beings over being, of the confusion of both, and of the dissolution of every priority in the era of the calculable understandability of everything. We know the future of the history of being, namely, that if it wishes to remain history, then beyng itself must appropriate thinking to itself. But no one knows the form of the beings to come. Only this can be known with certainty: every inventive thinking of beyng and all creating out of the truth of beyng, without the already protecting comfort of beings, require other powers of questioning and speaking, of projecting and bearing, than the ones the history of metaphysics could ever bring forth. For these other thinkers must still incorporate into thinking, along with what is most proper to them, the questioning dialogue with the first beginning and with its history, as these have emerged in bright depth, and must be equipped to become, along with the most solitary ones of the first thinking, even more solitary ones of the abyss which in the other beginning not only bears all grounds but also suffuses them. The history of metaphysical thinking in its "works," a history that for those who merely follow remains an object of historiological erudition and research and, at the end, of sheer pedantic instruction, must first become a history in which all things gather into their uniqueness and which, as a light-ray of thinking, radiates a truth of beyng into the latter's own untraversed space. Because beyng itself here compels a greatness of thoughtful Dasein, whose form we can scarcely surmise from the poetic existence of Hölderlin and from the horrid wandering of Nietzsche, and because only this greatness still resides in the space of the thinking of the historicality of being (and, because of this, even the talk of greatness remains too small), therefore the preparation for such thinkers must gather up everything that is unrelenting and must move amid the clearest distinctions. The reason is that only such distinctions bestow the courage needed for steadfastness in the domain wherein that which is most question-worthy thrusts forth, namely, that which is needed by the gods and forgotten by humans and which we call beyng.
The distinction in the question of being may be captured by formulas in two ways: "being and thinking" and "being and time." In the first formula, being is understood as the beingness of beings; in the second, as that whose truth is interrogated. In the first, "thinking" means the guideline for questioning beings with regard to their