itself as the extreme possibility of the decision of Western history, the possibility that beyng itself, of such an essence, arises as the indigence of the god, who needs the stewardship of the human being. This possibility is itself the origin "of" beyng, and what, according to the previous opinion about beyng, seems substantiated here in speaking of the most general and the trans-historical is entirely, above all, and purely and simply, the unique and the historical.
Amid everything unsupported in such questioning of the truth of beyng, what supports the presumption that the stroke of beyng might have already thrown a first convulsion through our history? Again it is supported by a single circumstance, that Hölderlin had to come to be the one who said what he did say.
Beyng is the conflictual appropriation which originarily gathers that which is appropriated in it (the Da-sein of the human being) and that which is refused in it (god) into the abyss of its "between." In the clearing of the "between," world and earth contest the belonging of their essence to the field of time-space wherein what is true comes to be preserved. What is true, as a "being," finds itself brought in such preservation to the simplicity of its essence in beyng (in the event).
To make such assertions about beyng does not mean to fabricate a conceptual determination; instead, it is a preparing of the disposition for the leap. Out of this disposition and in it, beyng itself, as projection, is reached in a leap for the sake of the knowledge which receives its essence as assigned to it first from this truth of beyng.
The appropriation and the contention, the grounding of history and the decision, the uniqueness and the unity, what has the character of the "between" and the fissured realm—these never name the essence of beyng in its properties; instead, in each instance they name beyng in the entire essential occurrence of its essence. To say one of them means not merely to co-intend the others in general but to raise them themselves to knowledge in the historically non-repeatable power of their essential occurrence. Such knowledge does not bring any objects to our attention and is also not an evoking or invoking of moral states and postures. Instead, it is the transmission of the stroke of beyng itself, and beyng as event grounds the temporal-spatial playing field for that which is true.
If it would help at all here to name what can be visualized, then we would have to say of fire that it first burns out its own hearth into the ordained hardness of a site of its flame whose spreading blaze is consumed in the brilliance of its light and therein allows the darkness of its embers to glow so that, as hearth-fire, it might watch over the center of the "between." The "between" becomes for the gods their unwanted yet necessary lodging and, for the human being, the free domain of the