The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs

Writing a memoir is a lot like spelunking. Headlamp on, I felt as if I were dropping down into deeper and darker caverns, negotiating vast and tight spaces to discover the great and terrible beauty that had been sustained in the cool dark places under the surface.

Steve audited Shakespeare, poetry, dance, and calligraphy. I was baffled he didn’t take more science and math, because that’s what he was good at and what Reed was known for. It’s remarkable to me that he followed his instinct to develop himself through the arts. He must have told me twenty times that he loved his dance class. “I’m not very good,”

As exhilarating as it is, change grieves me. And I’ve never quite understood separations or endings.

There was some rare, incomparable nutrient that had saturated my being in that place, a quality that, as Rumi says, “your whole life yearns for.”

The I Ching actually changed my understanding of time. I used it for years after that.

QUESTION: What does a person do about something that was lost in the past? ANSWER: Worry about how that loss might translate into losses in the future.

You can tell a lot about a culture’s values by how they treat particular segments of their populations. In this case, it was how they treated the young women who carried and gave birth to the babies and the future of the whole nation.

The computer flattens the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our lives, as it coaxes us away from real-time, face-to-face relationships with people and the natural world. I fear that one day we will finally have the science to show that generations of children have been harmed from using computers way too early and way too much.

Steve invented the name “Oaf Toabar” for himself. Oaf