But this holiday could not last, and, eventually, it was time, at last, for me to leave home. I will confess to feeling many regrets as I boarded the ship heading to Earth. I knew that I would miss the clear certainties, the stark and somber beauty of Vulcan. Most of all, I wished that my father and I had parted on better terms. But while my heart might have been heavy when I left Vulcan, the moment I caught a glimpse of Earth I felt my spirits start to soar. I recognized my kinship with the blue and white world below. I knew that I had made the right decision.
Surak
I HAVE NOT, I HOPE, OVER THE YEARS, ACQUIRED A REPUTATION FOR EXAGGERATION, but I believe that leaving Vulcan to attend Starfleet Academy was the saving of me. There are several reasons for this, one of the most important is surely the distance that it put between me and my home, and what I was starting to experience as increasingly difficult expectations in an increasingly impossible environment. There is certainly no confusing the Vulcan Science Academy with Starfleet Academy. For one thing, for all the heavy workload of study, no less than that which would be found at the Science Academy, the cadets seemed to be almost constantly at play. I am not talking simply of pranks and practical jokes (although there were naturally a great deal of those; what else would one expect from housing several thousand energetic and intelligent young people closely together) but of their attitude toward the work. This, I concluded from observation during my early days, was a kind of open-mindedness to the problems that were presented to us. At first, with a narrowness of mind arising from my own education, I dismissed this as an attempt to find loopholes and exploit them. Again and again, confronted with a problem, one of my fellow cadets (usually but not exclusively one of the humans), would say something on the lines of, “Let’s look at this from another angle…” or “Let’s turn this on its head…”
I was bewildered by this approach, and often reacted with a degree of censoriousness that did me little credit. To some extent, my officiousness was rewarded, initially at least, by the excellence of my grades. I was considerably ahead in most of the advanced subjects that we were studying on the scientific track: in this respect, the learning domes had done their work most thoroughly. But I quickly began to observe that one or two of my peers—those who were closest to me in the amount of information that they had at their disposal—were sometimes not only achieving grades higher than mine, but also earning considerably more encouraging comments from teachers. The comment most commonly associated with my own work was: “Technically excellent.” At first, I was satisfied—what more could be required of me but excellence? It was some time before I understood the nuance that lay behind that first word. Technically, my work was indeed excellent. In other respects, it was not. And, slowly, I began to see that my peers were starting to inch ahead.
It was not the fact of their higher attainment that troubled me: I am not by nature competitive. It was more that increasingly I could see that something about their approach was beginning to provide better results. Logically, therefore, if I wished also to excel, I must consider whether I too might benefit from less rigidity and more flexibility in my thinking. Although I played games (which Vulcan does not play games?), they were in general of a highly structured and intellectual kind. I had not before considered the possibility that open-ended play was in itself a good. Often, my human peers seemed to be overtaken by a reckless kind of mischief.
I recall one particular occasion in the lab. We were working in our usual groups of three: my lab partners at that time were a human named Louie Maher, and a Iltavian named Eiei. I found Eiei a particularly fascinating individual: Iltavians have a very short but intense life span that gives them, in effect, only twenty years of productive work. Eiei was at the academy for four months, altogether, before graduating, but the impression made on me was very great.
Our experiment was concerned with testing the upper limits of dilithium stabilization. “I suppose you want to do this incrementally,” said Maher, in a bored voice, and while I would certainly have been content to work through the problem methodically, I had observed my companions’ frustration throughout the previous sessions, and I did not want to test their patience along with the warp core. So, mindful of my decision to learn from how others went about their tasks, I said, “I believe we should try a different approach.”
Maher and Eiei looked at each other. Eiei laughed out loud. Maher cracked his knuckles. “Right,” he said, “let’s push this fecker as far as we can without actually getting ourselves killed.”
Is there any statement more human? More reckless, more ambitious, more playful, more likely to end in either complete destruction or remarkable breakthrough? For a second, I thought, I should stop this now… But I did not. I had committed to this course of action, and I would see it through. We pushed the warp core to its maximum point of instability. About two seconds before I lost my nerve and demanded we shut down the core, the dilithium entered a hyper-stable mode. “I knew it!” yelled Eiei. “I knew it!”
We ran the warp core in its hyper-stable mode for the next ten minutes before powering down again. “That,” I said, “was a truly fascinating experiment…” I examined the data we had collected. Already I could see the way back from the readings we had taken to a preliminary explanation of how the hyper-stable mode had occurred.
“Do you see what we did?” said Maher.
“I believe I do,” I replied. “Sometimes it may be logical to take a leap into the unknown and then look back to see what the steps there might be.”
“There’s hope for you yet,” said Eiei.
Our instructors were very pleased with our work (there was nothing “technical” about the “excellent” grade that we were given), although one of them did blanch when Maher described what we had done with the warp core. I reflected upon this experiment again and again over the next few weeks. I was beginning to see now that not only incremental approaches were underpinned by logic, and therefore that there was logical value to other ways of investigating the world. I could see, too, how the leap into the unknown that we had taken might have led nowhere; how, too, it had the potential to allow great steps forward in thinking. I reflected upon how our different worldviews—even our different experiences of time—had facilitated this. My own species, with its long lifespans and longer view of history, inclining me toward an incremental view of change, challenged by Eiei’s shorter, more intense experience, driving great leaps in thought. My logical approach, demanding we work through the steps that we had taken, but the very human curiosity and humor that drove to experiment in the first place. An illogical experimental leap, upon which we built a logical theory of what we had discovered. I understood the world better now; certainly, I understood humans better. That would be most helpful, in the years to come.
This, then, was one of my chief lessons from attending Starfleet Academy. For the first time in my life, I was able truly to experience Kol-Ut-Shan, infinite diversity in—if not infinite combinations, then more than I had ever seen before at close quarters. For the first time in my life, I was asked to live alongside people very different from myself. Let me note again here that I was brought up in one of the most diverse cities in the Federation. ShiKahr is a city of many embassies, visited yearly by hundreds of thousands of people from many different species. My family, too, with its diplomatic tradition, was hardly inward-looking (leaving aside my dual heritage), and, as you recall, my mother had ensured that I was, from a very early age, familiar with the art, music, literature, and, indeed, presence of other species beyond my own. But overwhelmingly the world I inhabited was Vulcan. The water in which I swam—or, as we might say on my home planet, the sand through which I walked—was intrinsically Vulcan. I passed through these other cultures as an observer—learning, experiencing, but distanced. Everything was prismed through the stark red lens of my homeworld’s philosophy and culture. At the academy, this was not an option. I was on Earth, with its blue skies and sunshine, or its grey clouds and rain, immersed in a hoth
ouse world designed to bring species and cultures together in order to ensure that their individual representatives learn mutual respect and understanding. My sense of superiority—a product of my upbringing and my insecurity—was quickly eroded. In part, I see now, this was through the gentle—and good-humored—handling of my peers. In part, it was simply not supported by the evidence of my own eyes.
As a result, I was learning to see my homeworld very differently, and one friendship that I made at the academy in particular provided me with considerable grounds for reflection. This was, perhaps counter-intuitively, with another Vulcan, named T’Kel, who had entered the academy at the same time but was on the command track. We met en route to Earth, and, despite our different study tracks, it was perhaps impossible for the paths of two Vulcans not to cross occasionally. Meditation rooms, events on the cultural exchange program, at the kal’toh board, even in the queue to see an exhibition of paintings by T’Ser or hear a string sextet—it was natural that two young people of broadly the same background would be drawn to similar events. We formed a friendship, and regularly met beyond classes. I remained somewhat on the periphery of T’Kel’s social group, which was extensive, and although I was welcomed, my preference was, and remains, for one-to-one encounters with other people. T’Kel and I enjoyed many extended lunch sessions, over which we carefully pulled apart the other’s experience of growing up on Vulcan.
One curious feature of our homeworld is that, beyond the major cities and the diplomatic corps, Vulcan is, in general, not an outward-looking world. One surprising statistic might be how few Vulcans leave to visit another world when compared to other species: fewer than six per cent of us have left our planet, compared to the Federation average, which remains fairly constantly between sixty-three and sixty-seven per cent. (There are outliers in other directions, of course. One can hardly fault the logic of the eighty-seven point three of Ferengi who prefer not to inhabit their homeworld.) Perhaps this is no real surprise: the overwhelming bent of Vulcan history has been to construct a society of great peace, plenty, and fulfilment. But it does mean that Kol-Ut-Shan is not often tested and is more easily believed in principle than lived in practice. The struggles of my father’s peers, who were cosmopolitan by Vulcan standards, to come to terms with his human wife and children, are surely evidence enough of this.
One interesting and further fact is that those Vulcans who leave continue to travel, as if, having embraced our core doctrine of infinite diversity, they find themselves wishing to live that doctrine more fully. T’Kel, who has gone on to a fine career in Starfleet, was such, and in our conversations together, I learned a great deal about my own world, and how my own upbringing was not necessarily typical. T’Kel was born in the T’Paal region, a pleasant and temperate area on the eastern edge of the Voroth Sea. T’Paal has a distinctive culture, partly arising from the fact that over the last couple of centuries, the area has drawn many off-worlders not simply to visit, but to settle. The climate is one reason; the carefree way-of-life is another. The town of T’Paal itself, and the small towns and villages around, are home to artists and artisans from many backgrounds; the pace of life is slow and relaxed. But not all this arises from the emigres and settlers. The locals too have a distinctive culture, one that, as I talked more to T’Kel, I came to understand was nevertheless as Vulcan as my own.
I had not, at this point in my life, ever visited this part of Vulcan and at first, when T’Kel described her home and upbringing to me, I suspected her of exaggeration. The green landscape she described, for one thing, sounded impossible. But it was true—a quirk of climate left this part of our world less barren than the rest. She, in turn, liked to hear me talk with familiarity about ShiKahr, finding the ease with which I spoke of the capital city enviable and sophisticated. When she learned about my background and upbringing, I realized that she found the highly disciplined and traditional approach to my education unusual. Not all Vulcans, I was beginning to understand, were educated in the same way and in the highly ascetic philosophy of my own class. And yet T’Kel was at least as focused as I was, and perhaps more able to cope. Was this simply that my half-human side was at odds with my background? I was starting to think that the fault was not in me—that it was not, even, in the Vulcan way of life.
What T’Kel and I most enjoyed debating, however, were our varied interpretations of Surak. At one point, when I was insisting on the primacy of logic, she suggested that I should go back and read again. And I did; I went back to these so-familiar writings, and read, once more, with great attention, and all the wisdom of my nearly two decades in the world. My intention was to read them to be able to counter T’Kel’s claims, but in fact I discovered that I was reading with more nuance, with a more open mind. A simple content analysis of the texts revealed how often and how many different emotions were referred to, and always with an emphasis on their mastery, rather than their suppression. (In fairness, let it be noted that later in life, T’Kel confessed to me that she too reread Surak at this time, and found his teachings to be—I shall quote her directly—“far more austere than memory made them”.)
At some point, inspired by my new reading of Surak, I began to translate his works into English. There were translations already, of course, but this exercise offered me a new perspective on his writings. I intended to read his works through human eyes, and this was a most rewarding experience. I began to see more nuance in his writing than I had before: a more sensitive understanding of the place of emotion in the Vulcan mind. My grandparents took great interest in this translation and encouraged me to send them sections as I worked. At the same time, I began to translate Conan Doyle into kitaulakh, the mode used on Vulcan for literary and philosophical texts. And, with the arrogance of youth, I began to write a t’san a’lat. Yes, with almost two decades of experience, I wished to impart my wisdom. I went back to this, before I began this current book, Jean-Luc, to remind me to approach this task with humility this time. My heart went out to the young man that I found there. It is raw, that book, filled with regret and no small amount of unhappiness, but not without hope or a genuine attempt to find a path through life. I have left this book for you too, Jean-Luc—the book of my youthful wisdom. I can hardly flatter myself that it is of particular literary merit, but there is great honesty there and, dare I say it, great feeling. Perhaps you might find someone with whom it will strike a chord, this portrait of a young man, far from home, struggling to bring together the different parts of himself to create a new and coherent whole. I was certainly a long way from achieving this, but here is where that process began.
* * *
Perhaps the most enduring and rewarding experience of my time at the academy was how my extended stay on Earth allowed me to have closer connection to and involvement with my mother’s family, my human family. There had been, as I have noted, only one visit by them to Vulcan, and a most memorable one, but for the main part my interactions with my grandparents, my uncle, and my cousin had been long-distance, at the other end of a comm channel. As a result, I hardly knew them well. My grandmother, prior to my leaving Vulcan, sent me a message saying that she hoped they would see something of me, that she would love to see me, but the last thing she wanted to do was “cramp my style”.
I was unsure how to interpret this. I had gained an impression that there was often subtext to human communication that I missed. I had almost persuaded myself that this was a request not to make contact, but, wisely, I took the message to my mother and asked her what it meant. She laughed. “Spock!” she said. “Your grandmother means exactly what she says! She loves you and wants to see you as much as she possibly can—but she knows you’re embarking on a new and busy life. She doesn’t want you to feel obliged to see them!”
I would not have reached this interpretation on my own, and I might well have decided that they most likely wanted to keep the Vulcan grandchild at arm’s length. Nothing could be further from the truth. My grandmother and grandfather were quietly, deeply, and pr
ofoundly glad to have, at last, the chance to become better acquainted with their daughter’s son. Arriving on Earth a full month before I was expected to report to the academy, I took a fortnight to travel: T’Kel and I, before our arrival, put together a brisk itinerary that took in several major cities, areas of outstanding natural beauty, and sites of historical importance—a most efficiently executed introduction to the marvels of Earth. The remaining two weeks I spent with my grandparents at their house in Cascadia, a little way outside Portland.
My grandfather and grandmother had met at Stanford, where they were both pursuing graduate studies. My grandfather specialized in nineteenth-century English literature, an expert in the visionary poet John Clare; my grandmother was an educational psychologist. They had brought up their two children in Palo Alto, but, after Amanda’s departure, they lost interest in the intrigues of academic life, and moved into the countryside to pursue research, writing, and other projects. My grandfather had become interested in the history and evolution of photography and its associated arts (he had recently completed the construction of a camera obscura); my grandmother had begun a detailed study of mystic writing and practice, and was, at the time, immersed in the works of Simone Weil. Their house was not large, but was remarkably peaceful, and there was usually a friend or two in residence who had come to enjoy the quiet and conduct some research or complete some writing of their own. At various points across my numerous visits, I met poets, playwrights, artists of several varieties, and a composer of musical theatre. My first winter break I went immediately to their home, experiencing the cold for the first time, and, more enjoyably, the pleasure of a warm house when the weather outside is bad. My grandfather and I revisited Sherlock Holmes; with my grandmother, I watched and dissected many black-and-white films. Many of their friends came by.
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