sky, the pure itself can be the pure only as it admits the crude close to its own essence and there holds it. This does not affirm the crude. Yet the crude exists by rights, because it is being so used with essential rightness.
All this difficult thinking. A mere dialectic, with its Yes and No, can never grasp it. Besides, possible misinterpretations threaten on all sides. For neither are we dealing here with a gross justification of the crude, taken by itself, nor does the crude appear merely in the role of a catalyst to bring forth purity, by itself. For, "under the firm measure" there exists neither the splendid self-sovereignty of the pure, nor the self-willed power of the crude, each cut off from its counterpart which it uses.
Once more, the "It is useful ..." signifies an admittance into the essence, by which the habitation on earth is granted and assured to mortals, that is, kept in safety for them. And a still deeper nature of "using" is concealed in the eighth stanza of the hymn "The Rhine." We are still unprepared to think it through.
In translating χρή in Parmenides' saying with "it is useful," we respond to a meaning of χρή that echoes in the root word. Χράομαι means turning something to use by handling it—which has always been a turning to the thing in hand according to its nature, thus letting that nature become manifest by the handling.
But thinking can so far have only a vague intimation of that high meaning of χρή, "it is useful," which speaks in Parmenides' saying. The "it is useful" which must here be thought, and which Parmenides nowhere elucidates, conceals a still deeper and wider sense than the word does in Hoelderlin's language. Perhaps we shall be able to hear Hoelderlin's language properly only when we comprehend the "it is useful" that is beginning to sound in the χρή of Parmenides' saying.
The user lets the used thing enter into the property of its