You have to make the effort to go back to 2010, September 2, 2010. And to imagine Steve Jobs. At that time surrounded by an aura of legend. In January 2007 he unveiled the electronic product that changed our lives the most, the iPhone; three years later it was the turn of the iPad.
In between, there had been a liver transplant in Tennessee to try win the battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer he had been diagnosed in 2003. Steve Jobs had once joked about his illness: it had happened at an Apple event in San Francisco, in September 2008. Then he quoted Mark Twain: “The news of my death is very exaggerated,” he had. said. But a few months later he was forced to admit that his health problems were more serious than expected and forced him to take a break from work. The break had served for the transplantthanks to a 20-year-old donor who died in a car accident.
At the presentation of the iPad, January 2010, Steve Jobs was very thin and yet he seemed to be able to do it. But he had now begun to deal with death and the meaning of life. And at 11 pm on September 2nd he wrote himself an email (who opens the online archive that the family inaugurated a few days ago) with the idea of entrusting those thoughts, those verses, in the only place where someone might one day find them: on the cloud.
Now you have to imagine the incredible, charismatic voice of Steve Jobs, as he reads these words: “I grow little of the food I eat, and of what I grow I have not selected the seeds. I have not made any of the clothes I wear. I speak a language that I have not invented or perfected. I haven’t discovered the math I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws that I have not conceived or legislated, and I do not enforce or judge. I get excited about music that I didn’t create. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself to survive. I didn’t invent the transistor, the microprocessor, the programming or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, alive and dead, and I totally depend on them for my life and well-being. “It was the act of love of a genius for humanity.