Not The Camus Quote I’d Have Gone With

So I’m three or four years behind on my reading of Birds and Blooms Extra. Which, to be fair, is not a magazine you’ve probably heard of nor one you’d expect me to read. But there was a time, long in the past, where I was interested in, if not birds, at least pretty flowerbeds and vegetable gardens. But that was before I moved to this Cthulhu-forsaken bermuda grass jungle. But I digress.

In an autumn issue, we’ve got an autumn-themed full page image, prints available for sale. And they’ve got a quote by Albert Camus on them.

Camus quote on a pretty picture

I’m not sure if that’s a real Camus quote or not. To be honest, I haven’t read all of The Myth of Sisyphus yet. Maybe it’s from that. But I can’t imagine how it came to be that this quote was appended to this image. Did an editor say, “Quick! we’ve got a picture of autumn leaves on a fungus! Get me an Existentialist quote, stat!” Did a passive-aggressive copy editor with a literature degree titter over his keyboard when he threw this quote on the picture, expecting no one would get it? Or, more likely, did someone do an Internet search for autumn quotes and find a result he or she liked?

Yes.

I, on the other hand, might have selected “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” Which is why I am not in charge of putting quotes on pretty pictures for a national magazine targeted to older people in the northern Midwest.

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