The Leap Into Beyng

Those strangers alike in heart, equally decided for the bestowal and refusal that have been assigned to them. The ones who bear the staff of the truth of beyng, the truth in which beings are built up to the dominance of the simple essence of every single thing and breath. The stillest witnesses to the stillest stillness in which an imperceptible impetus turns truth out of the confusion of all calculatively correct findings and back into its essence, such that there is kept concealed what is most concealed, viz., the trembling of the passing by of the decision about the gods, the essential occurrence of beyng.

The future ones: the slow, far-hearing ones who ground this essence of truth. Those who offer resistance to the thrust of beyng.

The ones to come are those future ones who receive--insofar as they expect on the way back and in sacrificial restraint--the intimation and intrusion of the absconding and nearing of the last god.

The task is to prepare for these future ones. Such preparation is served by inceptual thinking as bearing the silence of the event. But thinking is only one way the few venture the leap into beyng.

--Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu, p. 313.

"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar's surcoat.

"Hast seen the White Whale?"

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ch. 100.

The leap into beyng...