training to be competent for it (in mind and body) remain something supplemental whose facile disposing of the worst bungling is taken as a matter of course.
How find the way out of this? The first thing is to grasp that it is useless to try and improve any aspect whatever of that which lies on the surface, instead of bringing into salience the most extreme and broadest plight: the decay of being. But how experience this plight? Is | it necessary that many, the many, experience it? No—that is even impossible. The “situation”—not what passes for that today, but the place of the track of the essence of being—should and can be known only to a few, and they must be silent if they are to act in the power of this knowledge. The shuddering together before self-refusing beings must not become a public affair. But what is even less needed is a fabrication of the plight and of the affliction through a false memory of the mythical or through rummaging around in the unconscious, or the like. All that is indeed merely the same misunderstanding and the counterpart to the impotence of “spirit.”
Because nothing escapes contemporary people, because they have a facile and correct answer for everything, whereby they throttle everything as already having been, the essential must therefore remain in silence now and for the future—but all the harder and clearer may be what is said in the power of that silence. (Cf. p. 115.)
212
In the clarity and relentlessness of the end, the beginning is illuminated and the re-beginning becomes the plight. (Cf. p. 93.) The empowerment of the essence as the distant injunction into which we dovetail.
213
Beginning and end. (Cf. s.s. 31, supplement to p. 5c.24)
Being, once the lightning that suddenly bursts and draws all things into its light according to their measure and law and import—now a weary semblance allowing all import and measure to steal away.
Being—a gift, a jubilation and a shudder, a question—the beginning.
Being—an exhausted possession, an object of prattle, a bore, a name—the end.
24. {Heidegger, Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1–3: Vom Wesen der Wirklichkeit und der Kraft, GA33 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981), 28ff.}