"Remembrance" ❦ 203
arises: the ordering of a joint may hold sway within the power of that provocation, that is, within the absolute, essential domination of modern technology, from which and through which the whole in-finite relation joints itself into its fourfoldness. Only with the greatest difficulty can we hear the silent voice of this joining. For in preparation for this listening, we must first learn again to hear an older saying, in which the once great destiny of Greece rang out. We would need to anticipate each everyday experience and include within it what Heraclitus says in Fragment 54:
Ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων beyng.com: spelling corrected.
The joint that denies its appearance is of a stronger ruling than the one that comes to appearance.5
Insofar as we consider all of this, we might be able to think something insignificant [ein Gering-Fügiges, literally, something that joins in a humble manner] ahead of Hölderlin's poem, namely, the humble, in which he dwells in one place. Attuned to these thoughts, we may be able to become keener listeners for the song that, under the title "Greece," calls the great beginning into its possible coming to the humble.
It is the wedding of earth and heaven, since men and "a spirit of some kind," that is, a god, more communally allow beauty to dwell upon the earth. Beauty is the pure shining of the unconcealment of the whole infinite relation, together with its center. But the center, as the centering, that is, as the mediating, is what joints and what orders. The center is the joint of the relation of the four, which spares its appearing.
Since the rising of the great beginning—rising is φύσις, "nature"—the whole infinite relation has been preparing itself for the coming. Beauty is called into the work in order to release and to conceal everything in its own undamageable element. In lines 32-45, the draft "Greece" sings:
. . . For long already like leaves,
Or lines and angles,
Nature stands open to learn
And yellower the suns and the moons,