I carried to my country’s strand

Still, countless people look upon this “thing” sputnik, too, as a wonder, this “thing” that races around in a worldless “world” – space; to many people it was and still is a dream – wonder and dream of this modern technology which would be the last to admit the thought that what gives things their being is the word. Actions not words count in the calculus of planetary calculation. What use are poets? And yet…

Let us for once refrain from hurried thinking. Is not even this “thing” what it is and the way it is in the name of its name? Certainly. If that hurry, in the sense of the technical maximization of all velocities, in whose time-space modern technology and apparatus can alone be what they are – if that hurry had not bespoken man and ordered him at its call, if that call to such hurry had not challenged him and put him at bay, if the word framing that order and challenge had not spoken: then there would be no sputnik. No thing is where the word is lacking. Thus the puzzle remains: the word of language and its relation to the thing, to every thing that is – that it is and the way it is.

This is why we consider it advisable to prepare for a possibility of undergoing an experience with language. This is why we listen now more attentively where such an experience is put into lofty and noble language. We listen to the poem that we read. Did we hear it? Barely. We have merely picked up the last line – and done so almost crudely – and have even ventured to rewrite it into an unpoetical statement: No thing is where the word is lacking. We could go further and propose this statement: something is only where the appropriate and therefore competent word names a thing as being, and so establishes the given being as a being. Does this mean, also, that there is being only where the appropriate word is speaking? Where does the word derive its appropriateness? The poet says nothing about it. But the content of the closing line does after all include the statement: The being of anything that is resides in the word. Therefore this statement holds true: Language is the house of Being. By this procedure, we would seem to have adduced from poetry the most handsome confirmation for a principle of thinking which we had stated at some time in the past – and in truth would have thrown everything into utter confusion. We would have reduced poetry to the servant’s role as documentary proof for our thinking, and taken thinking too lightly; in fact we would already have forgotten the whole point: to undergo an experience with language.

Therefore, we now restore to integrity, in its original place in the poem’s last stanza, the lines which we had first picked out and rewritten.

So I renounced and sadly see:

Where word breaks off no thing may be.

The poet, normally very sparing with his punctuation, has put a colon after “see.” One would expect, then, something to follow which speaks in what the grammarians call direct discourse.

So I renounced and sadly see:

Where word breaks off no thing is.

Discussion Questions

1. Does the statement of the author about the vital importance of the word differ from the ancient belief that in the beginning there was the Word?

2. Do you think with the author?

3. Does the author touch upon the role of the name in the transformation language brings about?

4. How is Thatian’s view related to what Martin Heidegger says in his lecture?

Discussion Questions

• Why does Pãnini pay much attention to phonetics?

• Can Pãnini’s work be of any importance nowadays? Why?