Steve Jobs' Sister's Eulogy
Via Crid, from The New York Times, a beautiful and moving eulogy for Steve Jobs, by Mona Simpson, an LA-based novelist (who I know a little through dinners and parties at a friend's house). Simpson writes:
I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I'd met my father, I tried to believe he'd changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
...I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They're not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.
That's incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn't ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn't have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn't been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve's highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he'd order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn't favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: "Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later."
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
...Steve's final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
FTR — some of that is unadulterated boolsheet. She confuses "loyal" with "obsessive"... The fastest possible review of this guy's life shows a lifelong reflex for kicking people to the curb when he was through with them. He was sincerely, irredeemably brutal, and good people got hurt.
Having "beauty" described as the highest value isn't that impressive, either. I was similarly unimpressed this morning, when Jillette couldn't find room for "courage" in his top three.
I think this is part of the madness that appeared in the first comments here after Jobs died. People want to believe that humanity has changed somehow in recent millenia... That because we're so evolved, there are select individuals who don't have to worry about being kind to the less fortunate or brave towards the evil... They can just spend their lives thinking about beauty (Jobs) or creativity (Jillette).
In a world like that, each of us can at least dream of being that a person, the same way folks in primitive cultures can dream of being King, even if fate made them a peon.
Wrong planet, though.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 7:43 AM
The WSJ had a story on Jobs' biological father a few days after he died... Jobs was given up for adoption, but the father eventually married the mother and Mona Simpson was a result of that union. It sounds like the father just walked away- he was some kind of academic for a while but manages a casino now. A deadbeat. I was suprised the WSJ bothered with the story- it was on the front page.
ahw at October 31, 2011 11:07 AM
> It sounds like the father just walked away- he
> was some kind of academic for a while but
> manages a casino now. A deadbeat.
Let's not pretend his irresponsibility is exotic:
It's far too late to be saying "deadbeat" as if it were devastating opprobrium when so many people make babies without bothering to build a sturdy family. We should be similarly unimpressed by this guy's distress at childlessness:
This seems to have been a golden adoption, but it's not true that it HAAAAAAAD to happen. Jobs' parents, the ones who raised him, were especially wonderful people. While we need more like that, it would be great if we could count on them less, or at least not cluck resentfully about our own failures once they've come through for us.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 11:29 AM
I'll admit I wasn't especially impressed by his (biological) mother's actions, either.
ahw at October 31, 2011 12:04 PM
Well, she —
[A] Did the right thing (though if you read the biographies, she was a little weird about insisting his parents send Steve to college, without providing any assistance for them to do so
&
[B] Didn't whine, theatrically, about "having no son" 50 years after she'd done the right thing.
If Steve's life was a product of misbehavior, this is as close to redemption as a woman's gonna get.
And while the feelings in a moment like that can never be my own, women who've had them report that the ache is insane.
Props to (birth) Mom.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 12:37 PM
Oh, I don't mean the adoption. It was the 50's- I don't really think there was a choice as far as that went.
ahw at October 31, 2011 12:48 PM
What I like best about that piece is Oh Wows.
There exists, if only in my imagination, a tweedy, smirking kind of East Coaster –NYC or Boston– who gets a real kick out of making fun of California as a shallow paradise for fake-titty idiots.
But there's ZERO doubt where this revolution came from. The biggest, sexiest, most mind-expanding development in my generation, the personal computer, came from California. And the power of individual computing swept the globe. PCs commanded the first artificial heart, and then swept almost every conceivable data processing environment, relegating mainframes to boutique houses. And today, the most powerful supercomputers are all sweetly networked micros. Sweeping the Boston mentality of central processing from the marketplace was essential for making this happen.
A richly-drugged, pretense-incapable, Golden State hippy was essential to making it happen, and when he died, millions of people around the planet who'd never heard of "object code" wept out loud.
Old school computing, where not fully out of business, is along for the ride.
That's right, Motherfucker... "Oh wow."
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 1:30 PM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/10/31/steve_jobs_sist.html#comment-2727643">comment from Crid [CridComment at gmail]I LOVED the "Oh Wows."
When I moved here, one of these twin brothers -- two New York older Jewish intellectuals -- took me aside and told me not to believe the stereotype that everybody on the West coast was a bubblehead; that there were some pretty incredible minds out here, and you just have to look for them. He was right.
Amy Alkon at October 31, 2011 1:42 PM
I never lived in NYC and wasn't looking for them, but visited several times and never saw an actual incredible mind... But there were a lot of aggressive personalities, which is not the same thing. The Ipad is not a product of Stickball Computing, Inc.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 5:53 PM
I ran into Al Sharpton on the street once, which so, so doesn't count.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 5:54 PM
1:30pm coulda been a really strong comment if it hadn't been written over an apple (edible kind) and tiny candy bars from a coworker during lunch break.
I'm saving these up for a book, you know. Gonna make-uh million dollars
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 31, 2011 8:04 PM
I ran into Al Sharpton on the street once, which so, so doesn't count.
I hope you kicked him in the shins.
MonicaP at October 31, 2011 8:51 PM
Obviously, I never knew Steve Jobs, and for all I know he could have been a total asshole (and I also hate the instant sainthood some people put upon the recently deceased), but still, he made some awesome contributions to the world. I'm typing this from my MacBook Pro while my iPad, my iPhone and both my iPods are charging. :D
So yeah, I'm a fangirl. But I have been, since around 1992 or so. They guy knew what people wanted, I'll give him that.
Daghain at October 31, 2011 9:21 PM
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