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Thursday, October 6, 2011

The news of the day

We all live in Steve Jobs' world, and so when I learned last night that he had died, I was shocked that he had left us to fend in the world on our own.

John Markoff's obituary in the New York Times is a must-read. I apparently haven't followed Jobs' career very closely, because I didn't realize just how much it was influenced by the California counterculture that Robert Anton Wilson was so familiar with. Here is one of the sentences that jumped out at me: "He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand."

My other take on Jobs is here.

3 comments:

Oz Fritz said...

Love this quote by Steve Jobs:


No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

michael said...

Markoff's What the Dormouse Said seems required reading to get a good feel for the psycho-geographical milieux in which Jobs moved.

He had a brief correspondence with Albert Hoffman; Albert wrote Jobs when Albert was 102, asking to elaborate on his statement about using LSD as one of the best things he'd ever done.

Another thing a lot of people don't know about Jobs: his father was a muslim intellectual who gave him up for adoption.

Eric Wagner said...

I first heard of Steve Jobs in 1983 from Timothy Leary the first time I heard him speak. He waxed enthusiastic about the two Steves.