164 ❦ ELUCIDATIONS OF HÖLDERLIN'S POETRY

back can be presented. The sea thus takes away memory insofar as it gives it. But it gives memory at the same time that it takes it away. If the sea voyage grants a turning toward the foreign, then likewise, through the very viewing of it, it awakens a reflecting on what is one's own. This remembrance that is now bestowed, which thinks ahead toward the path to the source, again allows what is merely strange in the foreign to be forgotten, so that only that foreignness that is to be transformed through what is proper to one is preserved. Only because the taking away of memory is also a giving and the giving is also a taking away, does the sea take away and give memory. The sea voyage is permeated by a remembrance which thinks back upon the departed homeland and forward toward what is to be attained. Yet this thinking of the mariners can never be a pure remembering because it always requires some forgetting. To be sure, this remembrance already reaches back to the at home and preserves those who think in it.

And love too fixes attentive eyes.

Good conversation, to which the poet is so attached, which shows him how to remain in what is his own, lets him hear of days of love. For love is the vision of the essential being of the beloved, a vision which sees through this essence into the essential ground of the lovers. Yet this essential vision is unlike mere contemplation, which is only the enjoyment of an appearance. What the spirit of love sees is not confined to a mere appearance, but it fixes itself to the essence of the beloved, placing it back firmly on its ground through an attentive gaze. Hölderlin had first written (IV, 301):

    and
Love fixes
The eyes.