I: It would even be enough if we were to succeed only in building a bypath toward those ways.

J: Your speaking of hints seems to me to indicate a trail that might lead to such a path.

I: But even to talk of a hint is to venture too much.

J: We understand only too well that a thinker would prefer to hold back the word that is to be said, not in order to keep it for himself, but to bear it toward his encounter with what is to be thought.

I: That is in keeping with the hints. They are enigmatic. They beckon to us. They beckon away. They bee on us toward that from which they unexpectedly bear themselves toward us.

J: You are thinking of hints as belonging together with what you have explained by the word "gesture" or "bearing."

I: That is so.

J: Hints and gestures, according to what you indicated, differ from signs and chiffres, all of which have their habitat in metaphysics.

I: Hints and gestures belong to an entirely different realm of reality, if you will allow this term which seems treacherous even to myself.

J: What you suggest confirms a surmise I have long cherished. Your phrase "house of Being" must not be taken as a mere hasty image which helps us in imagining what we will, such as: house is a shelter erected earlier somewhere or other, in which Being, like a portable object, can be stored away.

I: That notion proves invalid as soon as we think of the ambiguity of "Being" of which we have spoken. With that expression, I do not mean the Being of beings represented metaphysically, but the presence of Being, more precisely the presence of the two-fold, Being and beings—but this