GUIDE: Clear evenings sometimes bring strangely bright nights.
SCIENTIST: Well then, let us go down the dark forest path!
SCHOLAR: And trust the sureness of our accustomed step.
GUIDE: As well as the near farness of the stars over the land . . .
SCIENTIST: For our conversation today a compass would in fact be quite useful.
SCHOLAR: We can easily fashion one for ourselves by more tightly organizing the task before which we have in the meantime been set.
SCIENTIST: So it seems that you already have in mind a plan for the continuation of the conversation.
SCHOLAR: It came to me of itself when we were previously considering whether we should summarize the conversation that had been cultivated up to that point.
GUIDE: A conversation that follows a plan is in our case probably an absurdity.
SCIENTIST: But a conversation without a plan is surely absurd.
SCHOLAR: Then let’s choose something in the middle. [75]
GUIDE: Why then don’t we let our conversation freely take its course?
SCHOLAR: Yet let us also be mindful that the conversation stays on its theme.26
GUIDE: Certainly. Of course, the more appropriately we are mindful of this, the more the theme disappears for us.
SCIENTIST: What do you mean by this?
GUIDE: I mean not only that we then lose the particular theme [Thema] of the conversation, but that in general we are freed from the ties to everything thematic [Thematische].
SCHOLAR: Why do you so mistrust what is thematic?
GUIDE: Because it is, as the name says, what is posited by us. In conversations of the kind ours is, on the other hand, what is spoken of may of itself bring itself to language27 for us and thus bring itself near.
SCIENTIST: Then it would be precisely a matter of being mindful of what brings itself near yet also at times, or even very often, distances itself.
SCHOLAR: So that, in speaking, a “listening into” [Hineinhören] the conversation would almost be more essential than the “speaking out” of making statements [Aussagen]?
GUIDE: This alone is what I meant with my reservations against what follows a plan.
26. Up until this point, I have used the more idiomatic “topic” to translate das Thema. Here, however, the more literal “theme” is called for.—Tr.
27. The phrase translated literally here, zur Sprache bringen, is commonly used in the idiomatic sense of “bringing up a topic (for discussion).”—Tr.