Everything poetized [Gedichtete] springs from the recalled thought of recollective thinking [Andacht des Andenkens]. Under the title Mnemosyne, Hölderlin says:
“A sign we are, without interpretation…”
We who? We contemporary human beings, the people of a today that has already lasted a very long time, in a length for which no time-reckoning of historiography ever finds a measure. In the same hymn “Mnemosyne,” it says [heißt es]: “Long is / the time” – viz., that in which we are signs without interpretation. Does this not give enough to be thought: that we are a sign, namely, one without interpretation? Maybe that which Hölderlin says in these words and in those that follow them belongs to that toward which what is most considerable points us, to the fact that we are not yet thinking. But does our not yet thinking rest in our being a sign without interpretation and without pain? Or are we a sign without interpretation and without pain insofar as we are not yet thinking? Were the latter to apply, then it would be thinking by which pain would first of all be bestowed on mortals as a gift and an interpretation would arise for the sign that mortals are. Such thinking would then for the first time displace us into a dialogue [Zwiesprache] with the poetizing of poets, whose saying seeks like no other its echo in thinking. 14 If we dare to take Hölderlin’s poetizing word into the realm of thinking, then we must of course guard [hüten] ourselves, lest without considering what Hölderlin says, we rashly identify [gleichsetzen] it with that which we are preparing ourselves to think. What is said in poetizing and what is said in thinking are never identical [das gleiche]. But the one and the other can say the same [dasselbe] in various ways. This admittedly only succeeds when the crevasse between poetizing and thinking purely and decisively gapes open. That happens whenever poetizing is a height and thinking is a depth. Hölderlin, too, knew this. We extract from his knowledge two stanzas, which have undergone revision:
14 [The following picks up in the second lecture of the course, after the recapitulation, with the last paragraph of GA 8:21 and at the top of p. 20 in Gray’s translation.]