ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins with Erik Wernquist’s short film Wanderers (2014) in order to emphasize the need to know more about wandering. It then shifts to a popular song from 1954, “The Happy Wanderer.” This sentimental fantasy of wandering makes sense contextualized in the period after World War II, but it also introduces the contrasting, unsentimental figure of Frederick Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes Nietzsche’s description of his alter ego as a “Wanderer and a Mountain Climber.” Nietzsche’s wanderer makes a meaningful contrast with the 1950s Happy Wanderer, whose signature refrain (Val-deri, Val-dera) comes close to absolute nonsense. Nietzsche, in a far different register, will invite readers to challenge ordinary modes of thought and expression that produce what we call sense. His enigmatic and opaque assertions at times press the limits of rational thought, but he implicitly invites readers to abandon The Happy Wanderer as an escapist artifact and to imagine, in its rigorous, joyous archetype as a high-stakes thinker with no safety net or absolutes, the Philosopher as Wanderer.
