Live long and prosper

But there was something else to Spock, one that spoke to seven- or eight-year-old me (Star Trek was in syndication by that point) the way I am sure it did to many others. Half human and half Vulcan, the young Spock made a conscious decision to retreat from sentimental human entanglements into logic. When another character tries to get under his skin, he observes: “I have no ego to bruise.” In a chaotic and threatening world, to be able to set aside, even if imperfectly, the aspect of one’s self that is vulnerable to the chaos is an alluring prospect: There is no threat if there is nothing there to be threatened. Twenty years later, I’d discover that this was the juvenile (a word that in this context is not pejorative) version of Stoicism, which makes substantially the same promises as Spock’s kolinahr discipline (possibly the nerdiest clause I have ever written), offering the same state of resolute tranquility that is, for the more than half-human, equally elusive. It is science fiction — and it is camp — but there is something in that that leaves me still convinced that a more Spockian approach to life would be eminently desirable, that water becomes transparent only when it is clean and still.

But perhaps that is not all so remote as it sounds: Leonard Nimoy, the thinking, feeling actor and artist, the Jewish kid from Boston’s West End whose parents wanted him to get a good education — and maybe play the accordion if he needed a creative outlet — and Spock, the epitome of logic and detachment, ultimately arrived at the same conclusion about what is good, about the right life and the right ambition: to live long and prosper.