Scientist: I have only summarized what we have just named, without representing anything to myself.
Guide: And yet you have thought something to yourself.
Scientist: Or rather, in fact, waited upon something, without knowing upon what.
Scholar: And how did you come to be able to suddenly wait? [117]
Scientist: As I now see more clearly, for a long time in our conversation I have been waiting upon the arrival of the essence of thinking. But now waiting itself has become clearer to me, and, together with this, the fact that we have all become more waitful, presumably along the way.
Guide: Can you tell us how this is the case?
Scientist: I’ll try, if I don’t have to run the risk that you will right away pin me down to particular words.
Guide: That is really not the custom in our conversations.
Scholar: Rather, we see to it that we freely move in words.
Guide: Because the word never represents something, but rather signifies something, and that means brings it to abide46 in the expanse of what it can say.
Scientist: I am to say how I came to waiting and in what way a clarification of the essence of thinking came to me. Because waiting goes into the open, without representing anything, I attempted to release myself from all representing. And because what opens the open is the open-region, I, released [losgelassen] from representing, attempted to remain purely released over to [überlassen] the open-region.
Guide: So you attempted, if I surmise correctly, to let yourself be involved in releasement [sich auf die Gelassenheit einzulassen].
Scientist: To be honest, I did not really think of this, even though we had previously talked about releasement. The occasion which led me to let myself into waiting in the manner mentioned was more the course of the conversation, rather than the representation of any specific objects we considered. [118]
Scholar: We can hardly come into releasement more fittingly than through an occasioning which allows us to let ourselves into an involvement [Veranlassung zum Sicheinlassen].
Guide: Above all when the occasion is still as inconspicuous as the silent course of a conversation that moves us.
Scholar: Which indeed means that it brings us onto that path which seems to be nothing other than releasement itself.
46. Although verweilen, “to abide” or “to linger,” is normally used only as an intransitive verb, Heidegger uses it here and elsewhere as a transitive verb. In such cases, where it is used with a direct object and an accusative in, I have translated verweilen as “to bring to abide.”—Tr.