This volume of already published texts (cf. References at the end of the book) seeks to bring to attention something of the path that shows itself to thinking only on the way: shows itself and withdraws.

Presumably this is a path leading to The Vocation of the Matter of Thinking. The vocation brings nothing new. For it leads us before the oldest of the old. It demands our abode within the ever-sought-after Sameness of the Same.

The path leading into this abode prevents our describing it like something that lies facing us. Whoever attempts to start out on this path is helped only by the unceasing endeavor to locate by discussion (to find at its locale) what the word “being” once revealed as something to be thought, what it may once perhaps conceal as something thought.

Whoever sets out on the path of thinking knows least of all concerning the matter that – behind and over beyond him, as it were – determines his vocation and moves him toward it.

Whoever lets himself enter upon the way toward an abode in the oldest of the old will bow to the necessity of later being understood differently than he thought he understood himself.

Yet this necessity is grounded in the possibility that a free realm continues to be granted in which the claim of what is handed down by history may play its role.