is lacking. "Thing" is here understood in the traditional broad sense, as meaning anything that in any way is. In this sense even a god is a thing. Only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it. Accordingly we must stress as follows: no thing is where the word, that is, the name is lacking. The word alone gives being to the thing. Yet how can a mere word accomplish this—to bring a thing into being? The true situation is obviously the reverse. Take the sputnik. This thing, if such it is, is obviously independent of that name which was later tacked on to it. But perhaps matters are different with such things as rockets, atom bombs, reactors and the like, different from what the poet names in the first stanza of the first triad:

            Wonder or dream from distant land
            I carried to my country's strand
    

Still, countless people look upon this "thing" sputnik, too, as a wonder, this "thing" that races around in a worldless "world"—space: to many people it was and still is a dream—wonder and dream of this modern technology which would be the last to admit the thought that what gives things their being is the word. Actions not words count in the calculus of planetary calculation. What use are poets? And yet ...

Let us for once refrain from hurried thinking. Is not even this "thing" what it is and the way it is in the name of its name? Certainly. If that hurry, in the sense of the technical maximization of all velocities, in whose time·space modern technology and apparatus can alone be what they are—if that hurry had not bespoken man and ordered him at its call, if that call to such hurry had not challenged him and put him at bay, if the word framing that order and challenge had not spoken: then there would be no sputnik. No thing is where the word is lacking. Thus the puzzle remains: the word of language and its relation to the thing, to every thing that is—that it is and the way it is.

This is why we consider it advisable to prepare for a possibility of undergoing an experience with language. This is