harvest (i.e., the Λόγος ) is to be thought as what constitutes the being of beings in general. Even if Heraclitus did not say more about the Λόγος and its essence as the harvest and the gathering (which for various reasons we may presume), it is necessary for us to think the essence of harvesting and gathering more emphatically. Why? Because we are assuming that the thinkers at the beginning of the history of Occidental thinking thought such things, and thought them in such a way that their thinking still continues to think beyond our thinking in new ways, which is why we may never catch up to that particular incipient thinking. Or is this assumption perhaps arbitrary? Is perhaps the assumption that the be-ginning of Occidental thinking shelters within itself the fate of Occidental history, thereby predetermining the truth of this history, untenable? Is the assumption that this beginning is of such dignity also untenable? I think not. Concerning earlier thinkers, we can only attempt a conversation that corresponds from a distance if we presume and recognize [288] that what the beginning of thinking once (in the past) began is once more (in the future) to come toward the human, owing to the fact that what is always already there in advance, thought in this double sense, is always ‘in front’ of human musing and activity. History, in its hidden course, is not progress from an inception to an end, but is rather the return of what is always already there in advance into the beginning. That is why in this particular case, which concerns the need to think the Λόγος in the manner of Heraclitus (i.e., as being itself), we cannot think the essence of λέγειν (namely, harvesting and gathering) essentially and richly enough. In addition, the other namings of being that are executed in the inceptual thinking of the Greeks give us enough guidance to define the essence of the Λόγος , in the sense of harvesting and gathering, in a manner proper to this essence. We should therefore not be content with the superficial characteristics of the initial understanding of ‘harvesting’ and ‘gathering’ as a human activity, thereby equating this activity of gathering solely and categorically with picking- up and carrying- together. Picking-up in the sense of taking something up and carrying- together is grounded in something other which, as the ground, also constitutes what is essential in the essence of ‘harvesting’ and ‘gathering.’ The strange thing regarding the essential constitution of harvesting (taken as a whole) is this: that it itself can only be what it is when it not only carries together what lies before it, but also when it pulls itself together into itself (i.e., ‘concentrates’ itself) and orients itself in all of its phases toward what has been determined in advance by harvesting and gathering. But this is a picking- up in the sense of a conserving. And conserving, for its part, is grounded in a sheltering. This, in turn, is a watching over something that at the same time harbors it. In ‘picking-up’ as a conserving, that which belongs to gathering in an essential (and not a retroactive) way is pre-served in advance. That is why gathering and harvesting are in their innermost core a preserving conserving. In this, gathering itself is entirely gathered into its own essence, a situation we call ‘for-gathered.’