Teacher: So that we let it come to us.
Tower Warden: But there is the guest coming around the bend in the path.
Teacher: Whereby you also mean to tell me that we should save the conversation we have begun about the essential occurring and prevailing of the provenance for another occasion.
Tower Warden: Not at all; I told you rather that the guest would like to listen.
Teacher: Even when it is a matter of such a general and wide-ranging question as that of the provenance of provenance?
Tower Warden: If you wish, let us leave the question, as it were, lying under way.
Teacher: The guest shall speak to us of his own accord about what concerns him.
Tower Warden: You may be mistaken.
Teacher: Then we must ourselves initiate the course of another conversation.
Tower Warden: If you like—but here he is; let me at once introduce you to him. In a certain sense he in fact knows you already, since yesterday evening in the tower room I first told him something about what has moved us for years.
The Guest: I am pleased to encounter both of you in [202] conversation— after having already heard a lot about what it is that you speak of.
Tower Warden: My teacher friend was admittedly about to break off our conversation.
Guest: Whatever for?
Teacher: For your sake.
Guest: That was a mistake.
Teacher: But you don’t even know what we are speaking about.
Guest: That I don’t know.
Tower Warden: Although you can guess what it is from what I told you.
Teacher: That we have long been moving ourselves [uns ... bewegen] on a between-field [Zwischenfeld].
The Guest: You mean between fields on the country path [Feldweg]?
Teacher: That would be splendid.
Tower Warden: But it is not so; to walk on the country path [auf dem Feldweg gehen] means that it is no longer necessary to make one’s way on this path [diesen Weg begehen]—
Teacher: such that it moves us.
Guest: Then the three of us are in the same condition, and there is no reason to break off the conversation you have begun.