The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. Gay Science,Book IV, last aphorism but one: The Heaviest Burden Nietzsche goes on to mention that Zarathustra’s fundamental thought is to be found here: The Wanderer is the mortal husk left after Wotan's heart was broken banishing his daughter, he hasn't been seen since subduing the fire god to accomplish this. He walks resolutely toward the mouth of a cavernous opening in a rock in the foreground and stands there. Night, storm, lightning, and violent thunder which soon ceases, while the lightning continues flashing among the clouds. We know he was thinking of a piece of music, and I believe this ties back into the Wanderer - see these stage directions:Ī wild spot at the foot of a rocky mountain which rises steeply at the back on the left. …spiders.moonlight between the trees…, which makes me think he's embellishing a bit. Nietzsche goes on to claim …the winter was cold and exceptionally rainy… “He Who Is Leaving: The Figure of the Wanderer in Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” Someone named Carlos Idrobo also wrote an essay explaining the thematic link between Nietzsche's work and Friedrich's painting: Idrobo, Carlos (November 2012). On the other hand, there was already an idealization of the "wanderer" in German consciousness (deriving indirectly from Wotan, the "Gray Wanderer"), and movements in art as well as literature reflected this in the current climate of romanticism that gripped Germany just before Nietzsche's prominence. because it might as well be a picture of Nietzsche. So, in some sense, the painting is prophetic. This mirrors Nietzsche's life, since in his daily habits, he would wake up, walk/hike around Sils Maria, while stopping to jot down his notes in a notepad he always carried with him, then after lunch would hike sometimes late into the evening, sometimes all the way up to the glaciers at the peaks. himself - whose form of philosophy is akin to traveling through "ice and mountain-peaks" and "forbidden country". Nietzsche also wrote about a character called "The Wanderer" - as a stand-in for N. So, the short answer is that in the popular consciousness, this work started getting used as a cover image or associated image with Nietzsche's work, and it stuck.Īs for the reason why the association was made in the first place: Zarathustra is a character who withdraws up into the mountains the story begins when he decides to come back down into civilization again. While Caspar David Friedrich did not intend any direct connection to the life or writing of Nietzsche (the painting was done in 1818), his work has often been featured on the covers of various editions of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, including by notable publishers, such as on the Barnes & Noble Classics edition. I just did a whole podcast episode on this:
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