142 ❦ ELUCIDATIONS OF HÖLDERLIN'S POETRY
weaken the light of the brightness. For the darkness permits the appearance of that which conceals, and thus in its appearing preserves what is concealed within. The darkness preserves in the light the fullness of what it has to bestow in its shining appearance. The dark light of the wine does not take away awareness; rather, it lets one's meditation pass beyond that mere illusion of clarity which is possessed by everything calculable and shallow, climbing higher and higher toward the loftiness and nearness of the highest one. So this filled cup does not produce a stupor. Its work is not to make one inebriated, but it does nevertheless make one intoxicated. The intoxication is that sublime elevation of mood wherein that single voice can be heard that sets a tone, and where those who are attuned to it may be led most resolutely beyond themselves. Of course, they are not resolute by means of any calculated decision of their own, but because their essential being is directed by that which the voice has provided them. The intoxication confuses the senses so little, that it rather brings sobriety for the sublime and lets one think of this. Sobriety without pretentiousness, genuine in many ways and secure in itself, is of another type than that which is tuned into the bare and lifeless, the desolate and the void. Both kinds of sobriety are essentially distinguished from the sobriety of intoxication that induces the audacity of lingering in the elevation of the highest. This intoxication lifts one into the illuminating clarity in which the depths of the concealed are opened up and darkness appears as the sister of clarity. The unfinished elegy "The Walk to the Country" (IV, 112 f. and 314 f.) can help to clarify this. Yet the almost surprising simplicity of this poem is still more difficult to think than other poems. We can only suppose that this walk to the country is the walk of one who has come home in the genuine homecoming. This walk which returns home is a remaining at home. The return is imbued with the single wish to build a house for the heavenly ones who are to come as guests, approaching the dwelling place of men. For only when this third element, the guest-house, stands between the heavenly ones and men, is there a place of mortal preparedness for the nearness of the heavenly ones, so that the heavenly ones can be for us the ones who they are. The poem names this one desire: to be allowed to begin the foundation of the guest-house in the holidays of