which embraces all that appears in the unity of the all-present. The all-present herself has in her inspiration the kind of presence that arises and awakens. In awakening, nature comes to herself and is in harmony with herself. Since nature is herself primordial and prior to everything, she feels primordially, that is, feels herself "anew."
The open in which everything has its coming to presence and enduring towers over the realm of all domains. That is why the awakening holds sway "from high aether down to the abyss." "Aether" is the name for the father of light and the all-enlivening, lightening air. "Abyss" means the all-enclosing which is borne by "mother earth." "Aether" and "abyss" especially name the most extreme domains of reality, but also the supreme divinities. Both are thoroughly spiritualized by inspiration. Inspiration does not stray, like a blind intoxication, into arbitrariness. It is
According to firm law, as once, begotten out of holy Chaos
Everything that is real is joined together by nature into its main essential lines. The fundamental traits of the All unfold themselves, in that "spirit" appears in the real, and what is spiritual is reflected in spirit. In addition, immortals and mortals must meet; both must always maintain their relation to the real in their own way. Any individual actuality in all its connections is possible only if before all else nature grants the open, within which immortals and mortals and all things are able to encounter each other. The open mediates the connections between all actual things. These latter are constituted only because of such mediation, and are therefore mediated. What is mediated in that way only is by virtue of mediatedness. Thus, mediatedness must be present in all. The open itself, however, though it first gives the region for all belonging-to and -with each other, does not arise from any mediation. The open itself is the immediate. Nothing mediated, be it a god or a man, is ever capable of directly attaining the immediate. Glancing into the essential depths of all, Hölderlin recognizes from his thought the significance of an early fragment by Pindar (Schröder no. 169):