Older Man: Perhaps the essence of freedom, however, is still more mysterious than we think.
Younger Man: As long as we are still thinking of it in terms of ruling and effecting.
Older Man: Yet I am also learning now to more clearly sense how it was possible for that which frees to be occasioned for you by the abiding of the expanse of the forest, and how in that which frees what is healing could draw near.
Younger Man: Which heals by soothing, but never removing, the pain. Older Man: However, as you yourself said, what was painful was that you remained barred from thinking. But it seems to me now that what was painful consisted rather in that you were no longer able to know in what sense you are one who thinks—and that means, after all that we have said, one who waits. You [231] were already one who waits whenever the event of the devastation distressed you. If we were not already in essence those who wait, then how could we ever become so?
Younger Man: According to an old saying, we only become who we are.
Older Man: And according to a young saying, we are only what we seek.
Younger Man: And we seek only that on which we wait.
Older Man: And we wait on that in which we belong.
Younger Man: Yet we belong to the coming as the present-waiting-toward [Gegenwart], which in answering [antwortend] lets in the coming.
Older Man: As this present-waiting-toward, we release ourselves to the coming, because our essence is already released to it.
Younger Man: And so in thus releasing ourselves, we first come into our own.
Older Man: Each of these sentences, which call to one another, says the selfsame.
Younger Man: And none can be preconceived [unausdenklich] because each thinks ahead [vordenkt] into the coming.
Older Man: The coming is presumably that before [vorauf] which nothing more can be thought: the unprethinkable [das Unvordenkliche].10
Younger Man: Hence, what heals can also never be set forth in propositional statements.
Older Man: But rather can only be conversationally surmised, as happened just now with us.
Younger Man: Or perhaps also in the manner in which I initially attempted to say it for myself, when, without their being willed, the following words spoke themselves to me: [232]
10. See the footnote above on p. 95.—Tr.