北京时间10月31日消息,苹果创始人乔布斯的妹妹莫娜·辛普森(Mona Simpson)昨天发表文章,悼念乔布斯,文章刊发于《纽约时报》,全文如下:
兄妹分离
我与母亲相依为命一直到大,因为家里穷,而我又早已得知父亲是叙利亚移民而来的,在我的想像中他像奥玛-沙里夫(Omar Sharif)。我希望他富有而慈祥,进入我们的生活(以及我们还没有配家具的公寓),帮助我们。后来,我遇到了父亲,努力相信他改了电话号码,没有留下地址,因为他是一个理想主义革命者,为阿拉伯人民描绘一个新世界。
我主张男女平等,在我的一生中,一直等待我爱的男人,也等待他爱我。数十年来,我一直想,那个男人可能会是我父亲。当我25岁时,我才遇到那个男人,他就是我的哥哥。
那时,我住在纽约,开始写自己的第一部小说。我在小杂志找到一份工作, 还有三个有志的同事。有一天,一名律师跑来告诉我(我当时是一来自加州的中产阶级女孩,和老板吵着要买健康保险),说他的客户很有钱很有名,是我失散的哥 哥,编辑们全惊住了。那是1985年,我们在一个文学杂志工作,我喜欢上了狄更斯的小说,我们都最喜欢他。律师拒绝告诉我哥哥的名字,同事们开始打赌。最 佳候选是约翰·特拉沃尔塔(美国演员)。我倒希望是文学家亨利·詹姆斯(美国著名小说家和批评家),他比我有天分,是天才。
第一次相见
蒙娜·辛普森(左)称自己在1984年第一次遇见哥哥乔布斯。
当我遇到乔布斯,他年纪和我相仿,穿着牛仔裤,看起来有点像叙利亚人或者犹太人,比奥玛-沙里夫帅。
我们散了会步,挺长,看起来我们都喜欢散步。我不太记得第一天相见时说了什么,只是觉得如果挑朋友就会挑他。他解释说,自己从事电脑工作。
我不太懂电脑,还在Olivetti打字机上工作。
我告诉乔布斯,最近才考虑买第一台电脑:它叫Cromemco。乔布斯说我的选择不错。他说他在造一些相当漂亮的东西。
想告诉大家几件从乔布斯口中听到的事,我们相识27年,有三个时间段:他的一生,他生病时,他去世时。
乔布斯从事自己喜欢的工作,他工作相当卖力,每天如此。
相当简单,但确实如此。
最高价值在“漂亮”
乔布斯与心不在焉者完全不同。
对于努力工作,哪怕是最终失败,他也从不觉得难为情。我从没碰到一个人像乔布斯如此不耻“尝试”的人。
在NEXT工作时,他受了伤,但依然前进。每天如此。
新奇不是乔布斯的最高价值所在,漂亮才是。
对于创新者,乔布斯相当崇拜。如果他喜欢一件T恤,他会订10年或者100件。在帕洛阿尔托家中,每个人可能都有足够多的黑色高翻领羊毛衣穿。
他不喜欢趋势和噱头,他喜欢人们遵从自己的年纪。
他对于美的哲学可以这样来形容:“时尚现在看来漂亮,但随后会丑陋,艺术最开始可以丑陋,但会越变越漂亮。”
乔布斯渴望变得更漂亮,他不介意被人误解。
还没有被请去苹果之前,他开着跑车去Next,更换过三四辆相同的车,他与自己的团队在那里开发平台,后来蒂姆·伯纳斯-李(Tim Berners-Lee)用它来为开发程序。
喜欢谈恋爱
在恋爱花费的时间上,乔布斯和女孩不相上下。爱是他的最高美德,是他的众神之神。对于共事之人的罗曼蒂克生活,他有所担心。
有一次,他看到一个男人,他认为女的可能会感兴趣,于是叫住他:“你单身吗?介意与我妹妹约会吗?”
乔布斯遇到Laurene(乔布斯之妻)后就打电话告诉我:“有一个美女,很聪明,她有一条狗,我要和她结婚。”
与亲人相处
当Reed出生时,他更易动情,且一发不可收拾。他是一个好动的父亲,孩子也一样。他为Lisa的男朋友担心,为Erin的旅行和裙子长度担心,也怕Eve被马伤着。
在Reed毕业晚会上,乔布斯与他共舞,让人难忘。
对Laurene的爱让他坚持。他相信爱一直在发生,在所有地方都存在。在这点上,他从不讽刺、冷嘲或者悲观。我也向他学习,现在依然如此。
年轻时代,乔布斯就成功了,他觉得成功使他孤立。认识他后,他所做的大多决定都是为了化解隔阂。一个来自洛斯拉图斯 (Los Altos)的中产阶级男孩, 与一个新泽西州(New Jersey)女孩结婚,像其它孩子一样养大Lisa、Reed、Erin和Eve,对于二人来说都相当重要。他们的家既不艺术,也不优雅,实际上,自从 认识他们多年以来,晚餐一般会在草地上进行,有进只有一种蔬菜。许多蔬菜,但只有一种。比如西兰花。
尽管是年轻百万富翁,他也常到机场接我,站在那里,穿着牛仔裤。
有时他在工作,家人叫他,他的秘书Linetta会说:“你爸爸在开会,还要我去打扰他吗?”
万圣节前夕,儿子Reed坚持要做女巫打扮,于是全家只好陪他。
他们曾想改造厨房,花了多年时间,他们便在车库的电炉上做饭。那时,皮斯克大楼也正在兴建,只完成一半。
并不是说乔布斯不享受自己的成功:他喜欢成功,只是并不痴迷。他说自己去了帕洛阿尔托自行车商店,并意识到自己可以买下最好的自行车,觉得相当高兴。
他还真这么做了。
众多奇怪的爱好
乔布斯很谦虚,他不断学习。
有一次,他告诉我,如果自己的成长方式不同,可能会成为数学家。他虔诚地谈到大学,说自己喜欢在斯坦佛校园漫步。在生命的最后几年,他还学习了马克·罗斯科(Mark Rothko)的绘画书,他早先并不知道这位艺术家,在未来的苹果总部墙上,会找到类似的感觉。
乔布斯搞怪。有哪个CEO知道道英文和中文香水月季(tea roses)的历史?又有谁喜欢大卫奥斯汀(David Austin)玫瑰?
他的口袋常装满东西,我敢打赌,Laurene一定会找到一些东西喜欢的歌、剪下的诗歌、可能放在抽屉里,就算是结婚20年也会觉得奇怪。每两天我们就 要谈次话,当我在《纽约时报》开了专栏,看到苹果的一些专利时,还是相当吃惊,看到楼梯草图时很高兴(乔布斯为苹果专卖店琉璃楼梯申请专利)。
乔布斯给四个孩子、妻子、我们所有人带来乐趣。
他珍爱幸福。
然而,乔布斯病了,他的生命渐渐流逝。曾经,他喜欢在巴黎散步,在京都找到一个小型手工荞麦面商店,滑雪时优雅下坡。一切不再了。
最终,一些普通的快乐也无法吸引它,如一个好的桃子。
从他的病中我才知道,他留下的比带走的多得多。
手术时的痛苦
我记得我们兄妹曾一起散步。在肝移植(liver transplant)手术之后,他站起来,腿太瘦了,看起来连身体都支撑不了,他用手抓住椅子后背,推下Memphis医院的走廊,然后坐在椅子上,休息一会,转着轮子行走。他每天都数着步数,每天前进一点点。
Laurene跪在面前,看着他的眼睛说:“你能做到的。”他的眼睛放大了,嘴唇却合在一起。
他努力了,一直在努力,而爱是最大动力。他是一个让人感动的人。
在最糟糕的时候,我知道他不是为了自己在忍耐。他有一个目标:等到儿子从高中毕业,女儿Erin去京都旅游,他造的船下水,他想带全家去周游世界,他希望有一天自己能与Laurene退休。
尽管病了,品味、辨别与判断还在。他换了67个护士才找到中意的人,有三个完全获得他的信任,一直相伴到最后: Tracy、Arturo和Elham。
有一次在斯坦佛I.C.U部门就医,乔布斯一贯不喜欢插队,也不愿亮出自己的名字,这一次却承认:自己想有一点特殊优待。我告诉他:乔布斯,这次是特殊治疗。他说:“我想要多一点特殊。”
当他不能说话时,就要一个笔记本。他画了一些素描,比如在病床上安一个iPad,设计新的移动显示器和X线设备,他还重新设计了“一些不特殊的”医院部门。每次乔布斯妻子走进病房,笑容再会出现。
有一什大事要注意,他会在本子上写东西,他抬头看时,你也要抬头看。这时,他的意思就是说想要一块冰,你要给他,医生本来不允许的。
没有人知道,我们会在这里呆多久。在乔布斯好转时,甚至是去年,他开始着手各项目,向员工发信说自己会康复。在荷兰的船工已经做好了不锈钢船体,准备安装木头。他的三个女儿还没结婚,两个小的还是女孩,他想参加婚礼,也参加我的婚礼。
对于一个癌症已久之人过逝,我的回忆可能不太准确,不过乔布斯去世是我们没预料的。
最后的几小时
从我哥哥的去世之中,有一点是最根本的:他是谁,他怎么死的。
周二早上,他打电话给我,让我快去帕洛阿尔托。他的语气充满深情和关爱,恰似一个行将远离的人的语气,虽然充满遗憾,但必须离去。
他开始告别,而我打断了他,说:“等等,我来了,我在去机场的的士上,我会到的。”
“我现在告诉你是因为我怕你赶不上。”
我到了后,他和妻子在开玩笑,像是生活和工作一辈子的伙伴。他看着孩子,视线仿佛永不离开。
直到下午2点,他的妻子还能叫醒他,乔布斯和苹果的朋友谈了话。
一会儿之后,他就再也无法醒来了。
他的呼吸改变了,变得剧烈、刻意,我觉得他又一次在数自己的脚步,想走得更远一些。
我当时明白:他也将这当成工作。死,从未发生,他达到了目标。
当他向我告别,并告诉我自己很遗憾时,他还告诉我,不能像计划的一样相处更长时间,他非常遗憾,现在他要去更好的地方了。
费舍尔医生说,要挨过当晚只有50%的机会。
他完成了。直到现在,他的形象依然是严厉的、英俊的、专制的、浪漫的。他的呼吸暗示旅途之艰难,他看起来在攀登。
乔布斯的最后几个字是临别时几个小时前说的,是单音节词,重复了三次。
临行时,他看着自己的妹妹Patty,然后盯着孩子看了一会,然后是自己的妻子,然后眼光飘向上方。
乔布斯最后的话是:OH WOW,OH WOW,OH WOW(哦,哇!)。
Op-Ed Contributor
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
By MONA SIMPSON
Published: October 30, 2011
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.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.
When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.
We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.
Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.
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.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”
I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”
When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.
None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.
His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.
Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.
Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.
When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”
When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.
They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.
This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.
And he did.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.
Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.
He treasured happiness.
Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.
Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.
Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.
I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.
He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.
One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.
I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”
Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.
By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.
None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.
What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
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.