of poetry and thinking as modes of saying. We shall for now leave open whether what we have done here is a restriction or a release. Yet being face-to-face with one another has a more distant origin: it originates in that distance where earth and sky, the god and man reach one another. Goethe, and Mörike too, like to use the phrase "face-to-face with one another" not only with respect to human beings but also with respect to things of the world. Where this prevails, all things are open to one another in their self-concealment: thus one extends itself to the other, and thus all remain themselves; one is over the other as its guardian watching over the other, over it as its veil.
In order to experience this face-to-face of things with one another in this way, we must, of course, first rid ourselves of the calculative frame of mind. The movement at the core of the world's four regions, which makes them reach one another and holds them in the nearness of their distance, is nearness itself. This movement is what paves the way for being face-to-face. We shall call nearness in respect of this its movement "nighness." The word seems contrived, but it has grown out of the matter itself in a thinking experience which can be repeated at will; it is no more unlikely than "wilderness" from "wild," or "likeness" from "like." The persisting nature of nearness is not the interstice, but the movement paving the way for the face-to-face of the regions of the world's fourfold. This movement is nearness in the nature of nighness. It remains unapproachable, and is farthest from us whenever we talk "about" it. However, space and time as parameters can neither bring about nor measure nearness. Why not? In the succession of "nows" one after the other as elements of parametric time, one "now" is never in open face-to-face encounter with another. In fact, we may not even say that, in this succession, the "now" coming after and the "now" coming before are closed off from each other. For closure, too, is still a manner of facing or excluding something being in face-to-face. But this encounter is as such excluded from the parametric concept of time.
The same is true of the elements of space; it is true of