Our attempt to see the neighborhood itself of poetry and thinking has faced us with a peculiar difficulty. If we were thoughtless enough to let it pass, the distance that these lectures cover and our progress along that way would remain hazy. The difficulty is reflected in what has already brushed us in the first lecture, and meets us head-on in the present lecture.
When we listen to the poet and, in our own fashion, consider what his renunciation says, we are already staying in the neighborhood of poetry and thinking; and yet again we are not, at least not so that we experience the neighborhood as such. We are not yet on our way to it. We must first turn, turn back to where we are in reality already staying. The abiding turn, back to where we already are, is infinitely harder than are hasty excursions to places where we are not yet and never will be, except perhaps as the monstrous creatures of technology, assimilated to machines.
The step back into the sphere of human being demands other things than does the progress into the machine world.
To turn back to where we are (in reality) already staying: that is how we must walk along the way of thinking which now becomes necessary. If we pay attention to the peculiar property of this way, the at first troublesome semblance of an entanglement fades away. We speak of language, but constantly seem to be speaking merely about language, while in fact we are already letting language, from within language, speak to us, in language, of itself, saying its nature. This is why we must not prematurely break off the dialogue we have begun with the poetic experience we have heard, for fear that thinking would not allow poetry to find its own words any longer, but would force everything into the way of thinking.
We must dare to move back and forth within the neighborhood of the poem, and of its closing stanza into which the poem gathers. We try anew to hear what is being said poetically. We shall assume that demands may be made on thinking, and with that we begin.