One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.

First, he is mortal. Second, the odds against him are not only actuarial -- the inevitable odds we all face -- they are clinical. Four years ago, he announced in a memo to his employees that he had undergone surgery, that the surgery was for the removal of a malignant tumor, that the tumor was on his pancreas, and that the surgery was, as he put it, successful. An exceptional man who specializes in exceptionalizing himself -- he has been an economic force for thirty years, and it's still hard to put him in a category, or even to say exactly what he does -- he responded to his disease by exceptionalizing it as well. He was at pains to say that the pancreatic cancer he had was not that kind of pancreatic cancer -- not the kind that kills you, without much room for exception, in six months or so -- but rather "a very rare form of pancreatic cancer... which represents about 1 percent of the total cases...each year, and can be cured by surgical removal." Even in extremis, Jobs was being Jobs: He was telling the truth, he was simplifying the truth, he was exaggerating the truth, he was leaving part of the truth out. It is true that his cancer, originating not in the ductwork of the pancreas but rather in the islets of Langerhans, is slow growing and, in the words of one expert, can be addressed "with curative intent"; it is also true that even after surgery, the average patient lives about five years.

Knowing this, it is a tribute to the power of his own, well, power that people were shocked at the way he looked when he took the stage in early June this year to deliver the keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference and present his company's usual slate of improvements and innovations. He was spindly as a mantis, and yet because he is who he is -- and was who he was -- he strode like a mantis as well: Though rickety, he, as always, made you not want to be a fly. Nevertheless, as soon as the keynote was concluded, ...