Inventive thinking displaces us out into that history whose "events" are nothing other than the strokes of the event of appropriation itself. We can say so much only by saying that this eventuates. What is this "this"? The fact that Hölderlin poetizes the future poet, that Hölderlin himself "is" as the first to bring up for decision the nearness and remoteness of the former and future gods (cf. the standpoint of the history of beyng).
Who could be surprised if, in the transition from metaphysics to the inventive thinking of beyng, this reference to the first "that" of the history of beyng is taken as completely arbitrary and unintelligible? It would hardly be of any use to retort by clarifying how all considerations stemming from the "historiology of literature," from the history of poetry, and from the "history of the spirit" must remain extraneous. Required here is already the leap into beyng and into its truth, the experience that, under the name of Hölderlin, this unique bringing-up-far-decision eventuates—is eventuating and not merely has eventuated. We could attempt to delineate this "event" historically in its uniqueness by seeing it in the midst of what is still the highest level and richest development of what has just past: in the midst of the metaphysics of German Idealism, in the midst of the formation of Goethe's image of the world, and in the midst of that which is separated from Hölderlin by abysses (i.e., in the midst of "romanticism"), even if all this has, from a historiological point of view, "influenced" him—the bearer of the name Hölderlin, but not the steward of beyng. But how does this contrast help us? It will, at most, merely provoke a new misunderstanding, as if Hölderlin were an "idiosyncrasy" precisely within that history of metaphysics and art. At issue here, however, is indeed not the "within," nor simply the exceptional "without," but the thrust of beyng itself. This thrust cannot be deduced and is to be captured in its purest "that," namely, in the fact that now, and since then, this decision stands in the history of the West, no matter whether it is perceived by the still-current era or whether it even can be perceived at all or not.
This decision first lays time-space around beyng itself and, as this time-space, extends out of beyng in unity with time, which temporalizes time-space in the originary unity of this temporal-spatial playing field.
Henceforth, all thinking which intends beingness by basing itself on beings, and departing from them, remains outside of the history in which beyng as event appropriates thinking in the form of what has the character of Dasein and of what belongs to Dasein. The vocation of thinking is to salvage for beyng the uniqueness of its history and to prevent the essence of thinking from ever evaporating again into the