Into those words, Nietzsche put all he knew. They are the title of a poem Nietzsche wrote when he was "most distant from cloudy, damp, melancholy Old Europe." Complete, the words run : "The wasteland grows : woe to him who hides wastelands within!" Woe to whom? Was Nietzsche thinking of himself? What if he had known that it was his own thought which would first have to bring about a devastation in whose midst, in another day and from other sources, oases would rise here and there and springs well up? What if he had known that he himself had to be a precursor, a transition, pointing before and behind, leading and rebuffing, and therefore everywhere ambiguous, even in the manner and in the sense of the transition? All thoughtful thought argues that this is so, as Nietzsche himself knew and often put into enigmatic words. This is why every thoughtful converse with him is constantly carried into other dimensions. This is also why all formulas and labels fail in a special sense, and fall silent, in the face of Nietzsche's thought. We do not mean to say that Nietzsche's thought is no more than a game with images and symbols which can be called off any time. The thought of his thinking is as unambiguous as anything can be; but this unambiguity is many-chambered, in chambers that adjoin, join, and fuse. One reason is that all the themes of Western thought, though all of them transmuted, fatefully gather together in Nietzsche's thinking. This is why they refuse to be historically computed and accounted for. Only a dialogue can answer, then, to Nietzsche's thought which is a transition—a dialogue whose own way is preparing a transition. In such a transition, Nietzsche's thought as a whole must, of course, take its place on the one side which the transition leaves behind to move to the other. This transition, different in its reach and kind, is not here under discussion. The remark is merely to suggest that the transition, more far-reaching and different in kind, must of course