“AS WHEN ON A HOLIDAY . . .”
For anticipating, too, she herself is resting.
Nature is at rest. Her rest in no way signifies cessation of movement. To rest is to gather oneself toward the beginning that is present in all movement, and toward its coming. That is why nature, too, is at rest anticipating. She is with herself by thinking ahead to her coming. Her coming is the coming to presence of omnipresence, and is thus the essence of the “all-present.”
Only because there are those who anticipate are there those who belong to nature and correspond to it. Those who co-respond [Ent-sprechenden] to the wonderfully all-present—to the powerful, divinely beautiful—are “the poets.” Which poets does Hölderlin mean? Those who stand in favorable weather. They alone persist in correspondence to anticipating, resting nature. The poet’s essence will be decided anew from this correspondence. “The poets” are not all poets in general, also not certain indeterminate ones. “The poets” are those future ones whose essence will be measured according to their adaptation to the essence of “nature.” And what this word “nature”— known for a long time, and long since worn out in its ambiguity—names here must be determined solely on the basis of this single poem.
One usually encounters “nature” in the familiar distinctions of “nature and art,” “nature and spirit,” “nature and [56] history,” “natural and supernatural,” “natural and unnatural." Thus “nature” always means a particular realm of beings. But if one wanted to posit “nature,” as named in this poem, as “identical” with “spirit”—in the sense of “identity” in which Hölderlin s friend Schelling thought of it at about the same time—then this would also be an erroneous interpretation of nature. Even the sense that Hölderlin himself gave to the word “nature” up until this hymn, in Hyperion and in the first drafts of Empedocles, falls short of what is now named “the wonderfully all-present.” At the same time, “nature” now becomes an incongruous word in reference to what is coming, which it is supposed to name. Nevertheless, the fact that this word “nature” is still permitted as a guiding word of this poem is due to the resonance of a saying-power whose origin reaches far back.
Nature, natura, is called φύσις in Greek. This word is the fundamental word of thinkers at the beginning of Western thought. But the translation of φύσις by natura (nature) already transposes subsequent elements into the beginning, and replaces what is solely proper to the beginning with something foreign to it.
Φύσις, φύειν, means growth. But how do the Greeks understand