The Fifty-Minute Nietzsche

Peter rushed into the classroom and fell onto a seat at the bottom of the horseshoe of tables aimed at the professor. Pulling a three-ring binder from his rain-soaked bag, he squeezed his toes in the wet lining of his shoes and wished he could be somewhere else. The professor had just begun his lecture, poised in front of the blackboard with his wrinkled notes in his right hand. He cleared his throat noisily in Peter's direction and started again.

"We must accordingly desublimate from the outset the interpretation of Nietzsche's theoretical expositions as solely psychological or anthropological. If it were construed as such, it might be facetiously interpreted as a superiority complex, as concatenated by Adler's representation."

Nodding slowly, his forehead knotted, Peter ripped a piece of narrow-ruled paper from his binder and gazed down at the tiny lines on the white page. He clicked the end of his ball-point pen and started scribbling on the paper. Dark blue ink quickly covered the light blue lines as Peter transcribed as many words and ideas from the lecture as possible.

The professor's deep voice continued without pausing as pens scratched furiously around the room. After five minutes, Peter's writing hand began to ache. He held the pen in his teeth and shook his hand, his fingers rattling into each other like the unfamiliar concepts rolling around in his brain.

Continued...

First published in Windhover:

[Cover not available anywhere on the Internet, darn it!]