Not With a Bang But A Whimper

So one of my favorite poets...probably one of my favorite artists....ever is T.S. Eliot. My favorite piece of his is The Four Quartets, but one of his more famous works is The Hollow Men. The Hollow Men is mostly about death, but its famous last sentences (probably more familiar to you from your high school lit days) goes a little like this:

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                        For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                                    Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                        For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Don't get turned off by the weird references and children's nursery rhymes. I remember when we discussed this, back in high school, everyone argued that the poem was depressing, that T. S. Eliot was obsessed with death. It was true he probably wasn't in the best state of mind... his marriage was having its swan song at the time, but I made the argument then, and continue to make the argument now that his piece was really a warning about not fully enjoying life.


I thought of this poem the other day, when I learned about Steve Jobs. He was, undeniably, an amazing man. People thought that he was almost immortal the way that he carried himself- he was larger than life- the messenger of dreaming big, the poster child for innovation...He brought us iProducts damnit!

After the news of his death slowly began to infiltrate the web, I noticed a steady stream of commentary articles also flood the internet, questioning whether Apple would be able to survive without him, whether innovation itself would stall.I, as a member of the next generation of dreamers, schemers and innovators, am insulted, but I'll save that for another post. But overall, my reaction is: really? Really? You think that now that sans Steve Jobs, the world will fall into a innovation stall? Maybe even begin to devolve so that by 2025 we're chiseling on stone again? C'mon!

Even Steve Jobs would be angry about that insinuation. Jobs didn't give us innovation- he gave us reasons to dream. He gave us proof that sometimes the impossible is possible, that sometimes the unthinkable is what everyone had been thinking all along, and they just didn't know it. I think that, in general as a species, people are prone to be ego-centric. Things that affect them deeply must affect everything in profound, impactful ways! But the truth is, the exact opposite is true. The more meaningful something is to you, personally, the less likely it is to mean proportionally the same "amount of important" to someone else. Let me give you an example (a very morbid example). After 9/11, thousands of families banned together, and in an unprecedented time of uncertainty and loss, America witnessed that people, deep down, were good people. Everyone agrees that 9/11 has changed all of our lives in unimaginable ways. However, that little girl who lost her father on 9/11, really remembers 9/11 second to to the fact that she has lost her father. But, to an outsider, who knew nothing about Mr. Smith, little Jane's father, who doesn't know what he/she doesn't know- he/she doesn't know the type of man he was or the things they did together. So, in the grand scheme of things, mostly unaffected by the loss of Mr. Smith.

So please. Let's stop trivializing the important things and overemphasizing the (relatively) little things. Steve Jobs- the man- is gone, but the important things that Steve Jobs stood for- the essence of him, will never be gone. Although it is a sad thing to say good-bye to a great man, I think he would be insulted if we accepted that the end of innovation itself is here. That would mean that his life was a singularity- an existence that didn't result in future gains or have any self-sustaining properties. I think he deserves a bit more than that. Steve Jobs' death is not the end. It's the beginning. It's a warning against not fully living life.