From Ow to Wow!

Steve Jobs still had the stern, handsome profile of an absolutist, the easily recognisable silhouette of a romantic looming in the byte of the Apple. But his breathing indicated an arduous climb against mortality, Steve Jobs’ novelist sister, Mona Simpson, reveals in her touching memorial eulogy to her iconic brother. “But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment,” she added, “the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later...

His final words, repeated earlier, were three monosyllables: Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” Now, people around the globe are trying to decipher what exactly did he mean? Did his words indicate some sort of a near-death epiphany? A mystical vision of heaven, a place he told biographer Walter Isaacson he hoped existed?

The legendary inventor Thomas Edison, to whom Jobs has been likened, supposedly said so too: “It’s beautiful out there.” Sceptics might quibble, however, that Edison simply made a factual statement after looking out of the window. Likewise, might Jobs’ last words simply be grateful ruminations of a man widely revered as a creative genius?

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap that you have something to lose,” he’d advised in an oft-quoted speech to Stanford varsity graduates. But Jobs was sane enough to concede to his biographer that “as he faced death, he might have been overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife”. Death, as Hamlet intoned, is indeed an ‘undiscovered country’.