Steve Jobs’s last words:
Steve Jobs’s last words: The eulogy of Steve Jobs by his sister, novelist Mona Simpson, was published in the New York Times over the weekend, offering a touching look into the late Apple co-founder’s life and last days.
The speech, in a few deft strokes, sketches the outline of a man who never stopped learning or trying to move forward. Hours before he slipped into unconsciousness, however, he did leave some enigmatic final words, which Simpson wrote in all capitals letters in her speech.
“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fast..._blog.html People are fascinated by last words. They can be viewed as a summing up of a life. Because the person saying them has nothing left to gain (except in terms of their legacy), they can be seen by some as an honest a representation of a person’s true opinions as one can get in this life. And there’s a mystical quality to last words–we hear them and wonder if the person saying them can give us any insight or information about what’s really on the other side.
Sometimes last words seem grim. Sigmund Freud reportedly remarked “Now it’s nothing but torture and makes no sense anymore.”
Others display deathbed wit. One of the last things Oscar Wilde said before his death was “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” (Although widely cited as his last words, according to the biography “Oscar Wilde” by Richard Ellmann, he actually said this many days before his death.)
Some last words are optimistic. Legend has it that Beethoven declared “I shall hear in heaven!”
But how accurate are such reports about the last words of famous figures? Ray Robinson, author of “Famous Last Words, Fond Farewells, Deathbed Diatribes, and Exclamations Upon Expiration,” notes in the introduction to his book that “I’ve come to appreciate the difficulty of authenticating so-called exit lines, since witnesses are often too distraught or confused to remember things accurately, or simply choose to edit or improve the remarks for the sake of posterity.”
For example, in 1920, the dying Notre Dame football player George Gipp was supposed to have told football coach Knute Rockne to ask one of his teams to “win one for the Gipper”–a phrase that Ronald Reagan, who played Gipp in the movie “Knute Rockne, All American,” later adopted for his political career. But according to Jack Cavanaugh’s book “The Gipper,” Hunk Anderson, the last player to have seen Gipp alive, doubts that the football star ever really said that. (On the other hand, Rockne’s wife said her husband even noted the phrase in his diary after it happened.)
Simpson, in her essay, suggested that her brother Steve Jobs’s last words had something to do with his “capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.”
Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, in a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” said that in his final encounters with his subject, the Apple founder began to talk more about his thoughts on God and an afterlife. Was Jobs’s final wow somehow connected?
Inventor Thomas Edison’s last words were close in spirit to Jobs’s reported exit line.
According to various sources, including the book “Edison: Inventing the Century” by Neil Baldwin, hours before his death, Edison emerged from a coma, opened his eyes, looked upwards and said “It is very beautiful over there.”
Which may be another way of saying “Oh wow.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/10/3...ally-mean/--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
