The University of Utah graciously invited me to try once again to lecture on Nietzsche without fainting. (See the story of my earlier failure here.) So yesterday I visited their campus, lectured to my friend’s existentialism class, and managed to remain ‘perpendicular to the earth’ for a faculty lecture. I had a great time. I never am at all confident if a lecture goes well, but for my part, I had fun. I will be making another attempt at BYU in two weeks; I am brimming with new found confidence. Then an inaugural lecture at the president’s house (I’ll blog about that later).

Perhaps some readers will wonder if I stuck to my philosophical principle of speaking without a paper or notes. (See here.) Well, in a word: no. I realized that part of the cause of my earlier failure was my not taking sufficient time to get my head soaked in the materials I was presenting. So I made more of an effort this time to immerse myself in the texts, and my own writing, on the subject of “judging from life’s perspective”, and felt like I needed the paper in front of me, to serve more or less as a reminder of all the various points I wanted to cover. The ensuing talk was probably 90% talk, 10% reading, and had spontaneous elements, so I view it as a partial success in terms of that earlier post. Again, whether the audience would see it thus cannot be known to me; if I asked them outright, their consarned kindness would only prompt them to say nice things, even if my talk stank. So, I’ll ring it up as a partial success and leave it at that.