VARIETY
ON MEETING
A PHILOSOPHER
In appearance he has nothing
of the philosopher. He is short and
stocky; his hair is thick and jet
black, with occasional white streaks.
When he emerged from the small
5kiing hut, high up in the moun–
tains, to meet me, he was dressed
in the costume of a Swabian peas–
ant. His heavy, squarish skiing
boots (it was summer), emphasized
still more strongly his relationship
to the soil. He comes of peasant
stock from the Black Forest and,
like Peguy, he has remained "a
peasant by tradition." His brother
still farms in the region. Martin
Heidegger, too, has never left it.
When Hitler called him to Berlin
in
1935
he rejected the offer. The
world had to come to him, to Frei–
burg, to sit at his feet. There he
lives, with Hellingrath's edition of
Holderlin's works. Just as one
finds here, in this native soil,
the key to the mystery of
HO!derlin, so one will also prob–
ably find the key to Heidegger's
philosophy and its assessment here,
in the conflict between the timid
peasant in him and the expanse
of the universe which he confronted
with the essence of its nothingness.
In his
Memorial to H olderlin,
the
506
poet of the Homecoming, Heideg–
ger has written his own memorial:
"The Serene holds and preserves
everything in tranquillity and
wholeness. The Serene is funda–
mentally healing. It is holy. For
the poet, the highest and the holy
are fundamentally the same." And
to Heidegger, thinker and poet are
one and the same-"the highest,
'above the light.' "
When he speaks he seems to try
to disappear behind
his
words, as
if afraid of them. His voice is sub–
dued and quiet, a continual whis–
per. When he delivers a lecture he
reads closely from his typescript,
without ever looking up, like Al–
dous Huxley. But Heidegger seems
to have nothing wrong with his
eyes. It appears rather as
if
he were
conscious of the poet's last leap
and of its consequences which he
seems prepared to accept.
It is the same with his written
word as with his spoken word. Both
are his means of expression and
both
try
to eScape from expressing.
Both withdraw from the world
which they create: the one into
stillness, the other into new formu–
lations, into an almost private lan–
guage of its own. His writings can
only be unraveled as James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
can be deciph–
ered: with patience, understanding,
and the will to understand. But it
needs a translation, preferably an
English one, to break down the in–
bred heaviness of his thought. His
words are the fear of the world
