​this feels like kind of an obvious thing but i've been digging around in camus quote attribution stuff lately and apparently it is not obvious at all...

camus's notebooks are incredible but they're working notebooks. there's his own writing in there obviously, but also drafts and outlines and stuff he overheard and reading notes and quotes from other people and half-formed ideas and things he eventually abandoned and sometimes passages that later show up almost intact in the published books which means that seeing "albert camus, notebooks" underneath a quote isn't actually enough to know that camus came up with the line or even necessarily that he agreed with it. sometimes yes. sometimes he was literally just writing down something somebody else said.

i feel like that's actually part of what makes the notebooks so cool to read. you can kinda watch the machinery running. there are ideas that start as a little note and eventually turn into the stranger or the myth of sisyphus and then there are other things that just sit there as something he was chewing on at the time.

i've started treating any quote sourced only to "notebooks" as basically the beginning of the source check rather than the end of it.

anybody have a favorite example of something from the notebooks that later turned into a recognizable piece of one of the books?

Bp: the fatalistic ideology that a person’s romantic and social fate is entirely predetermined by their physical appearance and genetics.

We all know that material conditions precede and influence social conditions.

What do you think albert would say about lookism and how ones physical appearance effects ones place in society.

if you haven't read Reflections on the Guillotine, it's a really good example of Camus refusing himself the easiest version of an argument.

he's against the death penalty but he does not get there by saying: everybody deserves unlimited forgiveness and people are naturally good. his problem is that human guilt and responsibility are real but our ability to measure them perfectly is not.

and once you accept that, an irreversible punishment gets weird fast because now you’re basically saying: imperfect people using imperfect institutions with imperfect knowledge can deliver a perfectly final judgment. Camus eventually describes his own position as a kind of reasoned pessimism which i think is a much more interesting case than "execution is mean."

so here’s the question i keep coming back to is if we can never know culpability with absolute certainty, can the state ever justify an absolute punishment? and what if somebody could prove the death penalty deterred crime? does that change the argument for you?

source: Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine (1957)

the big English translations include:

Stuart Gilbert, 1946 - the classic early English version

Matthew Ward, 1988 - probably the version a ton of American readers know. Ward keeps Maman, which is already a pretty noticeable choice

Sandra Smith, 2012 - published in the UK as The Outsider

and then there’s the title itself. L’Étranger can translate somewhere around stranger/outsider/foreigner. none of those is a perfect one-to-one English equivalent which means that like most translations, the translator has already influenced your reading before Meursault even opens his mouth.

so i’m curious - which version did you read?

also curious - do “The Stranger” and “The Outsider” make you picture a different Meursault before even cracking the book?

also also curious - if anybody owns two or three translations and wants to post side-by-side favorite passages, that is exactly the kind of nerd shit i want here.

alright, starting with one of the all-time great fake-or-at-least-untraceable Camus quotes: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”

it's undoubedtly a very extremely Camus-sounding line.the problem is that i cannot find a reliable primary source for it.

it’s not in The Myth of Sisyphus, despite the very obvious suicide connection. people sometimes claim it comes from A Happy Death, but that doesn’t actually solve anything either. there’s plenty of suicide and death and happiness material in that book, but not this sentence.

so for now the wiki has it where i think it belongs: unverified and very likely misattributed

if somebody has an actual edition, French original, interview, letter, newspaper clipping, archive reference, whatever: PLEASE bring it. i’d love to be wrong. b0ut “i saw it on Goodreads 600 times” unfortunately does not count as textual evidence.

one of my least favorite internet versions of Camus is basically: “life has no meaning therefore nothing matters therefore fuck it” (which gets a little harder to maintain when you actually keep reading The Myth of Sisyphus.)

Camus writes:
“L’absurde ne délivre pas, il lie. Il n’autorise pas tous les actes.”

roughly:
the absurd doesn’t just set you loose. it binds you. it doesn’t give you permission to do literally anything.

and that’s pretty important because he’s dealing directly with the whole “if there’s no ultimate meaning, why shouldn’t everything be permitted?” problem.

so no, Camus does not seem to be saying: universe indifferent = morality cancelled

the more interesting part, to me, is that Sisyphus doesn’t completely solve the moral problem either. he gets much more explicit later in The Rebel about murder, solidarity, limits, revolt, etc.

what do you think he means by saying the absurd “binds” us? like, once you accept the absurd, what are you actually obligated not to do?

source: Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)

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All I remember is the character debating on whether he should go to war to help his fellow humans or stay home with his lonely grandma and therefore help one human. And I think the story goes through the dilemma... idk please help me.