The work belongs together with The Wayfarer and August.21 The Road Leads On depicts the last years and the end of this man August, who embodies the uprooted, universal know-how of today’s humanity, but in the form of a Dasein that cannot lose its ties to the unfamiliar, because in its despairing powerlessness it remains genuine and superior. In his last days, this August is alone in the high mountains. The poet says: “He sits here between his ears and [21|29] hears true emptiness. Quite amusing, a fancy. On the ocean (earlier, August often went to sea)22 something stirred (at least), and there, there was a sound, something audible, a water chorus. Here—nothing meets nothing and is not there, there is not even a hole. One can only shake one’s head in resignation.”
So there is, after all, something peculiar about Nothing. Thus we want to take up our interrogative sentence again and question through it, and see whether this “instead of nothing?” simply represents a turn of phrase that says nothing and is arbitrarily appended, or whether even in the preliminary expression of the question it has an essential sense.
21. Heidegger refers to these novels by the titles of their German translations. Hamsun’s “August” trilogy begins with Landstrykere (1927), translated into German as Landstreicher by J. Sandmeier and S. Ungermann (Munich: Albert Langen, 1928); Heidegger incorrectly calls the novel Der Landstreicher, in the singular. The most recent English translation is Wayfarers, by J. W. McFarlane (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). The second novel is August (1930), translated as August Weltumsegler by J. Sandmeier and S. Ungermann (Munich: Albert Langen, 1930) and as August by Eugene Gay-Tifft (New York: Coward-McCann, 1931). The conclusion of the trilogy, Men Livet Lever (1933), was translated as Nach Jahr und Tag by J. Sandmeier and S. Ungermann (Munich: Albert Langen Georg Müller, 1934) and as The Road Leads On by Eugene Gay-Tifft (New York: Coward-McCann, 1934); the passage in question appears on p. 508 of the Gay-Tifft translation. We have translated it here from the German.
22. This and the following parenthetical interpolation are by Heidegger. He also inserts the dash after “here” at the beginning of the next sentence.