It has taken a few days to realize what has been nagging at me about Plaxico Burress’ tragic situation. … That was it! High school ninth grade English class, when we spent a couple of months knitting our brows being forced to read the sparse, depressing tomes of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre — in translation, of course. (You can imagine how long ago I went to high school.)
I can see him now, our English teacher, Mr. Berman, a diminutive, bow-tied, bespectacled fellow, writing and underlining this long, foreign, unfamiliar word on the blackboard: “EXISTENTIALISM.” We dutifully scribbled into our looseleaf notebooks.
“It’s a post-World War II French philosophy, boys” he explained quite solemnly. “An existentialist is the author of his future. You, and you alone,” and he pointed to us, “determine the course of your fate.You are responsible for the decisions you make, and the path you take. Indeed, you construct your life.”
Sounds like the plot of one of those arcane but impressive books I read all those years ago, like The Stranger, or The Plague or No Exit: A young, multimillionaire football star with the all the promise of a glorious professional future ahead of him leaves the remote safety of his gated country mansion, and crosses the broad river, into the sinful city for a night on the town. He brings a handgun into a crowded nightclub. It accidentally discharges and he is wounded. He is bleeding, panicked. A calm friend drives him to a hospital where he signs in under an alias which, in the end, will not protect him.