goddess Ἀλήθεια. This home also directs the course of the thinker's genuine experience. The home of the goddess is the first place of arrival on the journey of thinking and it is also the point of departure for the course of thinking that bears out all relations to beings. The essence of this home is wholly determined by the goddess. Her dwelling there first makes the home the home it is. And in dwelling the "essence" of the goddess is fulfilled. She is the self-presenting and hence indwelling look of the light into the darkness. Ἀλήθεια is the disclosedness that in itself shelters all emergence and all appearance and disappearance. Ἀλήθεια is the essence of the true: the truth Truth dwells in everything that comes to presence; it is the essence of all essence, essentiality [Diese west in allem Wesenden und ist das Wesen alles "Wesens" die Wesenheit].
To experience this is the destiny of the primordial thinker. His thinking knows in essentiality the essence of truth (not just the essence of the true) as the truth of the essence.
As the essence of emergence (φύσις), ἀλήθεια is the beginning itself. The journey to the home of the goddess is a thinking out toward the beginning. The thinker thinks the beginning insofar as he thinks ἀλήθεια. Such recollection is thinking's single thought. This thought, as the dictum of the thinker, enters into the word and language of the Occident.
This language expresses the essence of history, and history, because it is the sending of Being and because Being only comes to light unexpectedly, is appropriated always in the unexpectedness of the primordiality of the beginning. The history attuned to the primordial essence of the clearing of Being destines beings ever again to the destiny of decline in long-enduring concealments. According to this destiny, decline now holds sway, the evening of what emerged primordially.
The land drawn into its space-time {Zeit-Raum} from this history and sheltered therein is the Occident [Abend-land, literally, "evening-land"] according to the primordial (i.e., in terms of the history of Being) meaning of this word.
The language of the Occident expresses the beginning, i.e., the still concealed essence of the truth of Being. The word of the language of the Occident preserves the appurtenance of Occidental humanity to the home region of the goddess ἀλήθεια.