World Making
The world is not the mere collection
of the countable or the uncountable,
familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand.
But neither is it a merely imagined framework
added by our representation to the sum of such given things.
The world worlds,
and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm
in which we believe ourselves to be at home.
World is never an object
that stands before us and can be seen.
World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject
as long as the paths of birth and death,
blessing and curse
keep us transported into Being….
In a world’s worlding
is gathered the spaciousness out of which
the protective grace of the gods
is granted or withheld.
Even this doom,
of the god remaining absent,
is a way in which
the world worlds.
–excerpt The Origin of the Work of Art
by Martin Heidegger
