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Thinking within the beginning must renounce resting in a well-rounded “work,” the way this latter is made possible and required by the center of a historical course. The beginning must always—in concealment—protrude over all commencements and what comes from them. This protruding | can be reached only in an ascent. Consequently, inceptual thinking is always an ascending (and falling) which by itself first brings the protruding element before itself and up above itself to the protrusion—letting the mountains emerge.
Thinking in the other beginning is stepping up (understood as the event of the grounding of the “there”) into the excess of beyng.
120
Inceptual thinking is neither a “work” nor even a “process”—instead, it is a course which disappears as it proceeds and yet, as past, remains inimitable and full of directions—remains—to be sure, only in that constancy which finds its stance each time in a new leap of questioning.
121
In long and reticent meditation, one must have gone to and fro on the unfrequented paths leading to the concealed standpoint of Hölderlin’s hymns. Every fixed word is a misinterpretation here, because this standpoint, in its power to provide a ground for space-time | and in its precipitateness, can be taken up only in speech and indication, provided the blocks for its underpinning have been thoughtfully hewn and hauled. For that Da-sein which the poet has carried out in grounding it itself could never be attained by us through the much-invoked “reliving” of it. It is attainable only if, in the plight of our own itinerary, we once become mature for that Da-sein in which alone the open realm is effectuated for the tarrying and passing by, the flight and absence of the gods in one stroke. So we must rather deny ourselves constantly any words about the poetry of this poet, despite all incentives to communicate some things gropingly—statements and references to which it is then in any case granted to be registered somewhere in the “Hölderlin literature.” Is not here any kind of silence the most genuine relation to this poetry? Not as if what would need to be said is especially “significant” and “consequential”—but because it is too simple and too uniquely requires only the transformation of today’s humanity. For there still remains the expedient of saying something concealedly and more in the form of what is usual and in general to