Limits of Magical Thinking
By MAUREEN DOWD
Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare.
He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality in his.
There’s an arresting picture of Jobs staring out, challenging us to blink, on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Steve Jobs.” The writer begins the book by comparing the moody lord of Silicon Valley to Shakespeare’s Henry V — a “callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king.”
Certainly, Jobs created what Shakespeare called “the brightest heaven of invention.” But his life sounded like the darkest hell of volatility.
An Apple C.E.O. who jousted with Jobs wondered if he had a mild bipolarity.
“Sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was depressed,” Isaacson writes. There were Rasputin-like seductions followed by raging tirades. Everyone was either a hero or bozo.
Without God in one’s life there is no room for peace.
Categories: Internet, Psychology, United States