together with what reaches out for us, touches us. Assuming that the mover which holds the world's four regions in the single nearness of their face-to-face encounter rests in Saying, then only Saying confers what we call by the tiny word "is," and thus say after Saying. Saying releases the "is" into lighted freedom and therewith into the security of its thinkability.
Saying, as the way-making movement of the world's fourfold, gathers all things up into the nearness of face-to-face encounter, and does so soundlessly, as quietly as time times, space spaces, as quietly as the play of time-space is enacted.
The soundless gathering call, by which Saying moves the world-relation on its way, we call the ringing of stillness. It is: the language of being.
In the neighborhood of Stefan George's poem we heard it said:
Where word breaks off no thing may be.
We remarked that the poem leaves a thought-provoking residue, to wit, the meaning of "a thing is." Equally thought-provoking to us became the relation of the word that is sounded, because it is not lacking, to the "is."
Now, thinking within the neighborhood of the poetic word, we may say, as a supposition:
An "is" arises where the word breaks up.
To break up here means that the sounding word returns into soundlessness, back to whence it was granted: into the ringing of stillness which, as Saying, moves the regions of the world's fourfold into their nearness.
This breaking up of the word is the true step back on the way of thinking.