"I am never here only"
I'm continuing to work my way through Heidegger's later writings, and today was reading "Building Dwelling Thinking." I loved this section, and won't ruin it by commenting:
"When we speak of a man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over and above them space...Even when we relate ourselves to those things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things themselves. We do not represent distant things merely in our mind--as the textbooks have it--so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads of substitutes for the things. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that locale is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather it belongs to the essence of thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking persists through the distance to that locale. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge--we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing...When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as the encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it."