We are living in a peculiar, strange, and uncanny age. The more frantically the volume of information increases, the more decisively the misunderstanding and blindness to the phenomena grows. Furthermore, the more excessive the information, the less we have the capacity for the following insight: Modern thought is increasingly blinded and becomes a visionless calculation, providing only the chance to rely on effect and possibly on the sensational. But there are a few [people] left who are able to experience a [kind of] thinking which is not calculating but "thanking" These few are able to experience "thanking" as being indebted, that is, remaining receptive to the claim of what manifests itself: Beings are, and are not nothing. In that "is" [i.e., the presence of beings], the tacit language of being addresses the human being, whose distinction and peril consist in his being open in manifold ways to beings as beings.

Pp. 74-75

¶ 8:15 AM