over beyng been suppressed and falsified. But why does beyng, at this extreme limit of the derangement of its ungrounded truth, refuse to grant the plight of grounding? Why does beyng allow beings to rage from one pretext into another? Is this the self-refusal of the downgoing over and against humans and thus the deepest abasement of humans in the satisfaction of their crudest needs? Who experiences in all this the silent sovereignty of beyng? Who knows of the reservation of the decision regarding the abode of the last god? Everything is still entangled in the machinationally overfilled emptiness of the abandonment by being. Few surmise. And these few are unique. And these unique ones do not need to be enumerated.
Cast out into impotence even in relation to Godlessness, the human being totters—continuously equipping himself for this through historiology and technology—into animality and affirms “life,” in order not to deny being—which would indeed be a beginning—but in order simply to forget being, in the most bleak desolation of his pursuit of life. Pessimism? No. Then on the contrary optimism? Again no! Instead, steadfastness in the hardest and most frightful, simple and most abyssal, clearing of beyng? Yet a thinking whose discourse brings the silence of beyng into the endangered word which is most threatened by what has already been spoken. But a knowledge that seeks no refuges, neither in the protection of a god nor in the success of humans, neither in the shelter of the earth, nor in the value of the world. Every refuge is evasion of the abyss of truth and is withdrawal from the concealed suddenness of the bestowal of the moment. The appeal to beings of the highest and ordinary sort makes being something stable and permanent, requires—even against its own will—machination in the definitiveness of its power, ventures the attempt to debar history from its affiliation to the sovereignty of beyng, hunts the gods | in the loss of divinity, sends humans into the illusion of anthropomorphizing, snatches the earth from closedness, and thrusts the world into the emptiness of what is merely public.
To make public with the gigantic noise which machination maintains round about itself seems to indicate that the only historical age that could begin, after the time of the end of modernity, has to be the time of essential silence. Who could know whether, and in which form of humanity, the human being is appropriated to be the co-ground of this time of beyng?
The “reportage” of machination in “picture” and “sound” is the global “myth” of the consummating phase of modernity. The world of the most remote German farmstead is no longer determined by the mystery of the rhythm of the year, i.e., by the “nature” in which the