decision and so for the playing out of the strife and thus for the sheltering in beings.
Whether this call of the extreme intimation, this most concealed appropriation, still happens openly, or whether the plight becomes mute instead and all reigning is withheld, and whether the call is still taken up, provided it does happen at all, and whether the leap into Da-sein and thus, out of the truth of the latter, the turning still become history—therein is decided the future of humans. They may for centuries still ravish and devastate the planet with their machinations, and the monstrousness of this drive may "develop" to an inconceivable extent, assume the form of an apparent strictness, and become the measuring regulation of the devastated as such; the greatness of beyng will remain closed off, since decisions about truth and untruth and their essence no longer arise. All that matters is the calculation of the success and failure of the machinations. This calculation extends into a presumed "eternity," which is not such but is only the endless "and so on" of what is most desolate and most fleeting.
Where the truth of being is not willed, not incorporated into a willing of knowledge and experience, into a questioning, there all time-space is withdrawn from the moment, i.e., from the flashing up of beyng out of the enduring of the simple and always incalculable event.
Or else the moment still belongs only to the most solitary solitudes, although these are denied a grounding comprehension of the instituting of a history.
Yet these moments, and they alone, can become the preparations in which the turning of the event unfolds into truth and joins truth.
Indeed, only pure persistence in the simple and essential, which are uncompellable, is mature enough for the preparation of such preparedness; the fleetingness of the frenetically self-surpassing machinations is never so mature.
256. The last god2
essentially occurs in the intimation, in the intrusion and remaining absent of the advent as well as of the absconding of the gods that essentially occur as having been [gewesend] and of their concealed transformation. The last god is not the event itself and yet is in need of the event as that to which the one who grounds the "there" belongs.
2. Cf. The leap. 142. The essence of beyng and 146. Beyng and non-beyng; Prospect. 45. The "decision."