each with every other and many with each other. The time of the creators and peoples is cleaved by an abyss; it is not the common road on which everyone can race away and race past everyone else. That time of the peaks, however—that billowing of the most separate nearness of abyssal heights—can be intimated only by one who is like the shepherd, who knows nothing other than the stony path and the source, the alpine meadows and the clouds, the sun, and the storm.
c) A Textual Question: Different Versions of “Patmos”
Here we have occasion once again to point to the question of the text and to examine the alterations among the different versions. People usually call this ‘philological technicalities.’ There are such things, but not in a work like Hölderlin’s, and especially not if we move beyond merely cataloguing the changes. Here the struggle for every word is a pointer to understanding the poetry. Frequently, each newly formed or newly inserted word raises the entire work to a new level in terms of its inner cohesion, yet quite differently from a decisive stroke of the sculptor’s chisel. ‘Aesthetic niceties’? Our pointing out such alterations has nothing to do with this either, nor does it have to do with some empty curiosity that would seek to watch the poet in his workshop in order to learn how it is done.
Let us note the details of the alterations. The second version introduces the word “languishing.” The creators are located on the peaks, gifted with their vocation and with the resources of their creativity— and yet are “languishing” on mountains most separate. They remain behind in supreme solitude, not on account of mere inability belonging to a mediocre talent, but in the sense of falling short in the course of accomplishing the supreme and sole vocation they must assume. By introducing this opposition—up on the peaks near to one another and yet languishing and without any help—the poet intensifies the uniqueness of the creators and their times; and this intensified opposition is intensified once again in the third version by the insertion of the words “for clarity.” Despite supreme clarity and the purest vision, there is a dwelling that languishes, a beyng that falls short. It is precisely the differences between the three versions that set into relief the direction of the poetic telling and are therefore of inestimable significance for coming to terms with the poetry. We shall indeed have to follow entire poems in this regard. Cf. also the beginning of “Patmos” (IV, 190, 199, 227):
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.