Gondolier songs

A Facebook friend, Sam Panther, recently re-posted Simon Critchley's May 2009 "Opinionator" reflection on happiness, where Critchley turns to Rousseau's “Reveries of a Solitary Walker.” 

And Nietzsche too, like Kant, thought of Rousseau when it came to happiness and bemused drifting, wandering.  Thus he reprises the same thought tableau of which Rousseau speaks and Critchley recalls for us.

But Nietzsche, the philosopher who writes of "the happiness of a god," always turns such reflections just a bit, around and inside and at the same time, takes them to a higher level.

Reveries in a boat, as Rousseau — musician that he was — knew very well, would be for the later-born 19th century Nietzsche so many barcarolles, barcarolles that still sound for us in the 21st century.

Change the afternoon setting of  Rousseau's drifting reflections to evening, add Chopin, and the music does its work on, with, and for you.

Chopin's Barcarolle.  Almost all conditions and ways of life have a blissful moment, and good artists know how to fish it out.  Such is possessed even by a life along the seashore — a life that unwinds tediously, sordidly, unhealthily, in the proximity of the noisiest and greediest rabble — this blissful moment Chopin has in his Barcarolle, expressed in sound in such a way that the gods themselves, could on hearing it, desire to spend long summer evenings, lying in a boat.  

                                                                                                                          — Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow