2025-06-19 Camus - a fabricated quote
A threads gem from today: (N.B.: see WLA-2025-07-25 paragraph below)
ber9ta : I steal time every morning
"Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but "steal" some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe.
And you need to be."
— Albert Camus, from "Notebooks, 1951-1959"
WLA-2025-07-25: I have just finished reading Camus - Notebooks 1951-1959. And nowhere in those pages do any of the sentences in that paragraph attributed to those Notebooks exist. I did some online searching in the two earlier volumes of Camus' Notebooks in the InternetArchive editions and the word phrases that I searched on are not found. I conclude that the entire paragraph was just made up either by a machine or a person or a combination of the two or .... I have been wary of all the quotations that fill the socials and now I will assume that quotations that do not have a citable attribution are to be ignored. All these false citations or perhaps best to think of them as appeals to authority. So now I am in another mood.
(WLA 2025-06-26): I have been in a mood these past several months. Something about the "ways of the world" and "these uncertain times" and so on. It almost seems that every well-known and well-worn phrase, and aphorism, and ??? is amplified in every news commentary, analysis, and editorial. Whew! It's a lot! ... And then on June 19, this short excerpt from Albert Camus' "Notebooks, 1951-1959" showed up in my Threads social network stream.
And speaking of mood there is this from Humans of New York: 2025-07-03 Humans of New York