The Simple Essence Of Dwelling

"To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals--this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling."

--Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," Basic Writings, 360.

"Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being--their being capable of death as death--into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate mortals into the essence of death in no way means to make death, as the empty nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end...Rather, dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things."

--Ibid., 352-353.