The House of Being

They say the first word is a cry, but I, stubborn as I am, prefer to believe that before the cry there was silence, and that this silence was not absence, but anticipation—perhaps a pulse of a soul not yet accustomed to flesh, or perhaps a pause so that the world might learn to listen before it spoke. And if it was so, then the Word did not become flesh immediately, did not descend with thunder nor settle in books, but lingered in wait within the folds of time, curled like an ancient scroll, waiting for someone, in some language, to dare unfurl it.

And there stands man, this creature made of bones and riddles, mouth open to name the world, as if to speak were to exist, as if all that is, only is when spoken, pronounced, offered to the other through that fragile channel we call language. And if we believe Heidegger—not merely believe, but listen to him as one listens to an old prophet who does not shout but whispers—then language is not merely an instrument, not just a means, but a dwelling. The house of being, he says. Not wall, not shelter, but home. A word that guards, protects, that at once limits and reveals.

And where does this house come from, I ask, if language is neither brick nor cement? Perhaps it comes from listening. From the way we listen to the world even before we know we are listening. It comes from the words that precede us, the names we inherit, the myths that shape us even when we pretend we no longer believe in them. Language, as a house, is also a mirror; and whoever has entered a house of mirrors knows that inside it, every gesture is returned multiplied, distorted, re-enchanted.

But I do not hurry. For to speak of language is like trying to draw the wind with one’s hands: the more one tries to grasp it, the more it escapes. And yet we must go on trying, for something within us senses that we will only be whole when we are spoken, and that we will only speak truly when we are heard—not as echo, but as presence. Heidegger, that shepherd of words, wrote that “language is the house of Being. In its abode, man dwells.” And in writing this, he unmoored language from the trivial, as one who removes an object from a drawer and places it back on the altar.

Still, it is worth asking: what kind of house is this in which Being dwells? Does it have windows to the outside or is it a labyrinth with no doors? For not every word shelters us. There are words that strike like hail, words that build walls, that suffocate, that distort the inner landscape. There are also hollow words, that sound much and say little, like empty shells tossed upon the shore of communication. But there are those other words, rare, made of old wood—words that creak underfoot like trustworthy ground, words that welcome without judgment, that return us to ourselves when we no longer knew how to come back.

To these words, perhaps, we give the name poetic. Not for being adorned or artful, but for opening cracks in the real, for allowing the unsayable to peer through the gaps. Poetry, in this sense, is not a literary genre, but an ontological gesture, the courage to inhabit language as one enters a temple, knowing that the floor might fail, but also that there, and only there, Being may emerge. The poet, like the philosopher, is a laborer of language, but while one digs for the foundation, the other blows upon ashes to rekindle the flame.

And now that the house has been named, one must ask: what happens when it growls, collapses, turns to rubble? What happens to Being when language fails, when the just word is lost, when the whole dictionary falls silent before pain or love? For there are moments—and all of us have lived them—when language is not enough. And not because we do not know how to speak, but because the world exceeds us, and so we moan, we sing, we fall silent. Or we invent new words, like children who have not yet learned that things already have names. Language, at this point, is always unfinished, always yet to come. It is a house in eternal renovation, made of scaffolds and metaphors.

Heidegger, in saying that language is the house of Being, does not give us an answer, but a task. He gives us a labyrinth. For if Being dwells in language, then we will only know it if we dare enter this labyrinth of words, crossing its shifting walls, accepting to lose ourselves in order to perhaps later recover some spark of meaning. It is no coincidence that so many mystics have written as one who walks in the dark, trusting more in the rhythm of phrases than in the clarity of definitions.

And thus do we write here: not to define, but to dwell. Not to reduce the world to concepts, but to traverse it with long sentences, with detours, with turns—as one visits an old house, opening doors with care, honoring the ghosts, listening to the creaks of time.

And in inhabiting this house—or rather, in being inhabited by it—we discover that we are not alone, that we never were, for language is not a monologue, never was; it is always a between, a gap, a bridge, and even when we believe we are speaking only to ourselves—that vain thing called interior monologue, which is neither so interior nor so mono—we are, in truth, summoning voices, inheriting rhythms, repeating phrases once heard from the mouth of a mother, a teacher, an enemy, a poet, voices that settled in us without asking permission and that now echo as if they were ours, and perhaps they are, for in the end, what are we if not what we manage to say?

But we must go deeper, beneath the surface of words, where language is not yet discourse, but desire to speak, inaugural impulse, raw force that precedes grammar. For there is, indeed, an archaeology of the verb, and if we dig deep enough, we will find beneath the layers of rational language a ground made of wonder, of babble, of enchantment—and perhaps that is why language is also spell, is power, is magic. And I do not speak here in metaphor, but in reality—for who has not felt the force of a word spoken at the right time, which illuminates, which heals, which cuts?

Perhaps that is why ancient traditions knew that to name was a dangerous act, almost sacred. In Genesis, Adam does not merely observe the world, he names it—and in naming, he creates; the Kabbalists, in turn, believed that each letter bears a divine spark, and Indigenous peoples across the world hesitate to utter certain names outside ritual, for they know that a word is not mere sound—it is body, presence, gesture.

Heidegger understood this, and thus spoke of language as Ereignis, that untranslatable term bearing the sense of an essential event, of something that not only occurs but reveals, unveils, lets appear what was hidden. When we speak, we do not merely communicate—we bring to light what was in the dark. And when we fall silent, it is not always from lack of words, but because Being, in that moment, refuses to inhabit any form.

And here we arrive at one of the great tragedies of our time: the emptying of language, its banalization, its reduction to technical instrument, to commodity. For if language is a house, then today we dwell in plastic condominiums, stacking clichés like flat-pack furniture, forgetting that every word must breathe, must echo, must be chosen as if it were the last. Haste has dislodged us from the verb. Social networks, as noisy as they are communal, have taught us to type without thinking, to speak without listening, to respond before understanding the question.

And I ask: where is Being in this turmoil of fast words, in this noise of voices that do not speak but merely scream? Where does Being dwell when language becomes ruin? Perhaps it does not dwell. Perhaps it is exiled, wandering like a ghost in search of shelter. And perhaps—just perhaps—our task is to rebuild that house, stone by stone, verb by verb, until we may once again inhabit a language that reveals rather than conceals us.

But rebuilding requires listening. And that is an art we have forgotten. Listening to the other, listening to the silence between words, listening to language itself when it rebels and refuses to serve us. For there are moments when the best we can do for a word is to leave it be, not force it to fit a discourse that is not its own. Like the gardener who does not pull the flower before its time, the thinker of language must learn to wait.

And perhaps for that reason, silence is not the opposite of language, but its condition. The place from which it is born and to which it returns. The dark backdrop that allows the word to shine. Heidegger said that Being speaks through language, but it does not say itself all at once. There is always a remainder, a shadow, an interval. And it is in that interval that we dwell.

It is not easy to live there. It demands patience, demands detachment. For the temptation to fill every space with speech is great, especially in a world that confuses speech with power, visibility with existence. But there is ancestral wisdom in the unsaid. Poets know it, translators know it, lovers too. And perhaps that is the true dwelling of Being: not in the word that imposes itself, but in the one that offers itself—with humility, with wonder, with the risk of being misunderstood.

For now, I pause here. The house continues to be built, and with each phrase we lay another brick in that invisible shelter we call language.