Younger Man: We, however, are precisely not such subjects and are no longer such subjects [229] when we become those who wait. Rather, in waiting, we release things precisely into where we—as those who wait—let ourselves into, namely into that in which we belong.
Older Man: And wherein do things belong?
Younger Man: In that in which they rest [beruhen].
Older Man: And wherein do they rest?
Younger Man: In the return to themselves.
Older Man: So when the human sets things toward himself as objects, and only lets them stand as such and subsist in this sense, he does not let things be in their restful repose [Ruhe].
Younger Man: The human chases things around in an unrest that is foreign to them by making them into mere resources for his needs and items in his calculations, and into mere opportunities for advancing and maintaining his manipulations.
Older Man: By not letting things be in their restful repose, but rather—infatuated by his progress—stepping over and away from them, the human becomes the pacesetter of the devastation, which has for a long time now become the tumultuous confusion of the world.
Younger Man: If we are those who wait, then we do not, as it were, have things come to us; in this manner we would straightaway change from those who wait to those who await and only will something of things.
We are those who wait when we let things return to themselves. Out of such a return to themselves, they bring their own presence [Gegenwart] from themselves toward [entgegen] us; so in advance they fill out the emptiness that seems to gape around us when we wait on the pure coming, and do not just now and then await something that comes. [230]
Older Man: We would have to properly say that the things that are in this way present do not allow for an emptiness in the first place, and so there is also no possibility of filling out this emptiness. Younger Man: The pure coming, on which we wait, is also not something blurry and indeterminable. It is the unique and the simple itself, to which we humans, however, adapt ourselves only slowly, because we are seldom capable of letting something be in that in which it rests.
Older Man: But as soon as we are capable of this, namely of letting something be in that into which—as into its own essence—it is let, then we are truly free. Freedom rests in being able to let [Lassenkönnen], not in ordering and dominating.
Younger Man: This freedom alone is the true superiority, which does not need to have something under it, on which it must support itself in order to remain above.