Florida is nice. At least as nice as I remember it. I haven’t been back in a year and a half and it’s still hot as hell. Humid. Mom told me that the twenty-seventh was probably the hottest day of the year. I can believe that. Eighty-four degrees and humid.

I’ve collected three new books so far: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. David McCullough’s 1776. Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I started A Million Little Pieces last night and I’m tearing through it. It’s dark. And funny. I wonder why people pissed and moaned about Frey making up—embellishing?—parts of the book. It doesn’t change anything. It’s still a damn good book.

I found a stack of books I’d given to my mom several years ago and I wonder why she never read them. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Jonathan Franzken’s The Corrections. Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. There are a lot more, but I can’t remember, off the top of my head, what else was in the shelf. I’ll read The Crimson Petal and the White. I never finished it. I remember enjoying it so I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it. It had a very Dickensian feel to it. It’s one of those books that stays with you.

I haven’t been able to get back into Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. I’d misplaced it and wasn’t able to read it over the last two weeks. Maybe the time, at least for now, has passed. Or maybe it’s because A Million Little Pieces is so compelling that it overshadows any other books I’m reading. In any case, I’ll wait a bit before picking it up again. Maybe I’ll just start over. I didn’t get very far with it—seventy-five pages.

It’s so damn hot.

For years, women have told me, “I want a man with a good sense of humor.” My response has usually been, “Well, you’re certainly high-maintenance. I don’t think this is going to work.” No wonder I’m still single. Or maybe I just need to keep my irony in check and learn to smile a bit more.

Existentialism is said to be all about “the death of God,” the meaninglessness of human life, and the anxiety those provoke. It is in the face of such anxiety that one needs the courage to make meanings, to be oneself. The theme gets dutifully traced back to Søren Kierkegaard and [Friedrich] Nietzsche, and forward through Martin Heidegger, [Albert] Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich, and Viktor Frankl, always with a touch of heroism but surrounded by the darkness of despair and ultimate meaninglessness.

In the early years of existentialism in postwar Europe, the emphasis was indeed on gloom and hopelessness. The books and articles that made the biggest splash—William Barrett’s Irrational Man, for instance—were those that bemoaned the death of God and the despair and meaninglessness that are implied by that cosmic absence. That was challenged in the sixties by the celebrations of hipness in the United States at the hands of Norman Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself, and some of the Beats. The heady optimism that ruled America in those years leavened the Old World gloom and turned meaninglessness into a challenge, recasting the death of God into a sense of liberation. Even in Europe, existentialism came to present itself as a positive philosophy, a philosophy of hope, in works like Camus’s essay “The Rebel” and Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”

Scott Turow on the lynching of Saddam Hussein and the role of capital punishment in a civilized society:

As to Saddam, I would argue that from a very restricted legal standpoint, his execution has little to do with the central juristic question of capital punishment, which asks whether it is ever right or moral for the state to take the life of a citizen as the price for violating the law. Saddam was not condemned for his misconduct as an ordinary Iraqi citizen. He was punished for his lawless abuse of state power. His execution raises the singular question of how to respond when a state actor runs amok. This distinction is what led the Israelis in 1962 to execute Adolph Eichmann, who had supervised the Nazi death camps, even though their constitution generally prohibits capital punishment and has kept them from executing even captured terrorists. But the manner in which Saddam’s execution was carried out proves yet again why capital punishment is always a parlous enterprise.

[...]

The only rigorous justification for the death penalty, I believe, is as a symbol of moral restoration. For ultimate evil, the argument goes, there must be ultimate punishment, because a society needs to make as bold and emphatic a statement as possible that some crimes go beyond the boundaries of what we can envisage as human.

The problem, however, is that once we accept that justification for capital punishment, it must be carried out in a way that preserves its force as a moral statement. We must faultlessly identify what constitutes ultimate evil, as opposed to some lesser infraction, and we must ensure that whoever is punished is guilty without question.

Of course, the reality of capital punishment in the United States is that it is still imposed with haunting randomness. Variables such as where the crime occurs (death sentences are more frequent in rural areas), the wealth of the jurisdiction (the sheer expense of death prosecutions occasionally deters them), the race of the victim (throughout the U.S., whites and blacks are sentenced to death far more often for killing white people than for killing black people), the native inclinations of the prosecutor, and the skill and resources of the defense all contribute to whether or not the death penalty is sought and imposed.

Not to mention the most disquieting fact, that horrible crimes often propel a rush to judgment that has led 123 Americans to be legally absolved of crimes for which they were initially sentenced to death. Because the law fails in these ways rigorously to identify ultimate evil, the value of the death penalty as a moral statement is largely vitiated in practice.

Here’s something fun: create your own library catalogue card. You can see mine in the “About” section. Don’t forget to drop me a line so I can see what you’ve come up with.