OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Yet the question we have been asking all along is how can this memory, this making inward, of the already-immanent objectiveness of consciousness happen in the innermost of the heart? It is a matter of the inward and the invisible. For what is remembered (made inward) as well as where it is remembered (made inward) are of such an essence. Memory, making inward, reverses departure into the arrival into the widest compass of the open. Who among mortals is capable of this reversing memory, this making inward that reverses?
Admittedly, the poem says that a safebeing of our essence would be brought to us by the fact that men "sometimes even risk more . . . than life itself does, by a breath risk more."
What do they risk, those who risk more? The poem, it appears, is silent about the answer. We will therefore try to accommodate the poem thoughtfully and draw on other poems for help.
We ask the question: what else could be risked, what would risk more than life itself, that is, more than the risk itself, that is, risk more than the being of beings? In each case and in every respect what is risked must be of such a kind that it affects all beings because they are beings. Being is of such a kind; that is, it is not one particular kind among others, but the mode of beings as such.
If being is the uniqueness of a being, how is it possible to go beyond being? Only through being itself, only through what is its own, or rather in such a way that it comes specifically into its own. Then being would be the uniqueness that preeminently goes beyond itself (the transcendens par excellence). However, this surpassing does not go up and over unto another, but rather it comes over unto itself and back into the essence of its truth. Being itself traverses this passage and is itself its dimension.
Thinking this, we find by experience that within being itself there is a "more" belonging to it and so we find the possibility that there too, where being is thought as the risk, that which risks more than even being itself can prevail, if we are representing being as we usually do, on the basis of beings. Being traverses, as itself, its precinct [Bezirk] which is demarcated [bezirkt] (τέμνειν, tempus) by the fact that it essences in the word. Language is the precinct (templum), i.e., the house of being. The essence of language is neither exhausted in reference, nor is it only a matter of signs and ciphers. Since language is the house of being, we therefore arrive at beings by constantly going through this house. If we go to the fountain, if we go through the woods, we are already going through the word "fountain," through the word "wood," even if we are not saying these words aloud or have any
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