A compendium of perspicacious reportage and a weblog about all things pertaining to politics, news and intergalactic agriculture; weblog of Alistair Murray.
I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.
Jobs usually had little interest in public self-analysis, but every so often he’d drop a clue to what made him tick. Once he recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
You cannot teach these things in a book. But you can see them in a life. And every life lived without fear is a life that can sustain and nourish others. And Jobs truly lived without fear - which enabled him to create beyond the measure of most mortals. That he had, in the end, everything to fear - a rare pancreatic cancer slowly moving toward him - only makes his energy and spirit more vibrant. He was alive when he died.
Steve Jobs was a geek: he hacked phones, built computers, and wrote code. But he was also an artist: he studied calligraphy, dated Joan Baez, and actually understood what could make a phone sexy. He was a hippie: who else drops out of Reed? But he was an authoritarian, too. He knew what you wanted better than you did, and he was going to give it to you.
During Jobs’s lifetime, shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons” felt free to satirize the darker side of Apple’s feel-good, idealistic entrepreneurialism. (In a “Simpsons” episode, an indifferent “Steve Mobs” tells Lisa, “I know our posters say ‘Think Differently,’ but our real slogan is ‘No Refunds.’ ”) It’s not surprising that there has been little of that in the elegiac postings on Twitter. Instead, we’re mourning the visionary whose story we admire: the teen-age explorer, the spiritual seeker, the barefoot jeans-wearer, the man who said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
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