Is that Ecclesiastes/Baudrillard quote accurate?
Here is the King James translation of Ecclesiastes, and nothing like that quote appears to my cursory reading.
There are a few layers here… Of course, if it were a quote from Ecclesiastes, it would be a translation from the Hebrew. So the answer to this question needs to take into account the problems of translation. Is it possible to make an argument that this is Baudrillard’s own, highly idiosyncratic, translation of one verse or another from Ecclesiastes? Maybe. But it would be a pretty tenuous argument. I think any usual standard of “accuracy” would lead you to conclude that this quote is not a reliable rendering of any of the text from Ecclesiastes. That said, it echos some of the spirit of Ecclesiastes, which is about the ephemeral, transitory, and ultimately illusory nature of the human experience.
