The great, pivotal times of the peoples always emerge from the abyss, and, in each case, in accordance with the extent to which a people reaches into it—which is to say, into its Earth—and possesses homeland. For this reason, pivotal times of a people are not experienced, let alone comprehended, on the shallow plain of the platitudes of the day’s gossip and its ever-skewed considerations, or all the contingencies to which it clings, blind with respect to origin and advent of the necessary. The necessary cannot be arrived at by calculations balancing cause and effect, but is a grounding only within the abyss.
. . . Und gewaltig dämmerts
Im ungebundenen Abgrund
Im allesmerkenden auf.
. . . And mightily it dawns
Within the unbound abyss
Within the all-divining.
(“The Titans,” IV, 210, lines 72ff.)
Whoever knows only the day, and indeed the everyday, recognizes nothing and knows nothing, just as he also does not know the night,
. . . wenn alles gemischt
Ist ordnungslos und wiederkehrt
Uralte Verwirrung.
. . . when all is mixed
Disorderdly and there returns
Primordial confusion.
(“The Rhine,” closing lines, IV, 180)
When the poet tells of the Earth and names meadows of the homeland and valley and rivers, this is all far removed from every kind of poetic depiction of nature, whether the latter is sweet and dreamy or rapturous and sublime, or whether it is faithfully preserving and proclaiming mysteries.
The fundamental attunement of a holy mourning in readied distress, out of which it is no longer an ‘I’ who speaks, but a ‘we,’ is thus a truthful preserving of the heavenly that have fled and thereby an awaiting of the newly threatening heavens, precisely because it is ‘Earthly.’ ‘Earthly’ does not mean created by a creator-god, but rather an uncreated abyss within which all emergent happening quivers and remains held.