Perhaps through this supplement it has become somewhat clearer what I intended with the sentence: Hölderlin says (where he does not speak of building and does not articulate poetry as measure-taking) — Hölderlin does not say the identical thing that our thinking says. Nevertheless, we think the Same that Hölderlin poetizes. And it is this Same which also requires that every questioning, researching, and thinking directed toward history — and representing it historically as the manifold of what is almost irreconcilable — must come, within such representing, into the historically Same. This is not thought in a Platonic sense: something supra-temporal standing above the many; for in that way the many is merely degraded into the identical. The Same is that which appropriates itself and either reveals or withholds from human beings the treasure of its concealed fullness in history. When, in my attempt at thinking, I point toward the so-called ontological difference — the difference between beings and Being — and note that this difference as difference has never yet been thought within the history of thinking, this statement is not intended in the sense that Plato, for example, was somehow intellectually incapable of thinking this matter, rather, I see in the fact that what I call the ontological difference, or simply “the difference,” has remained unthought—not a failure on the part of humanity, but rather … indeed … simply the event that here something had not yet become manifest, and that accordingly something has been reserved for the human being insofar as the human being stands in relation to Being (eksists). And this reserved dimension could once again become for the human being the domain opened through recollective thinking back into history — not prediction — such that this dimension, in itself and according to its essence, might become the dimension within which the human being once again finds a more originary return to Being. For one may indeed say, on the basis of present experience and the destiny of contemporary humanity, that humanity is incapable, through mere ordering and organizing, through conferences and congresses, of deciding anything essential; that the world changes only when Being once again reaches us.