As Saint Anselm College students left for Spring Break on February 27^th, a very unfortunate and sad piece of news came across the airwaves. Leonard Nimoy, the legendary Boston-born actor best known for playing half human-half Vulcan Spock on Star Trek, had died. Nimoy suffered from COPD and had passed away at his home in southern California. Legions of Star Trek fans around the world expressed their sorrow, mourning their beloved science officer.

Leonard Nimoy was best known for Spock, but he refused to be linked to the character so closely, a point he attempted to make in his 1975 autobiography I am not Spock. The book discussed his complicated relationship with the character that he was best known for. Twenty years later, he would release another autobiography entitled I am Spock, in which he acknowledged the impact that playing the character made on him not only in terms of success, but also as a person.

Nimoy was a truly talented human being. He directed Star Trek films as well as 1980s hit films like 3 Men and a Baby. He also had a passion for photography, releasing three books of his work in the early 2000s, he even was a singer, yet to the world he remains Spock. (For those who are really nerdy, I recommend The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, you won’t regret it) In his later years, Nimoy had taken to the modern times, just as Spock would have. He had a very active Twitter account, (though not nearly as popular or active as fellow Star Trek star George Takei’s) and would frequently tweet out various pieces of wisdom, news, and even poetry. He would sign each tweet with “LLAP” an acronym for “Live Long and Prosper” the famous catchphrase of Spock.

I am a confessed nerd. I love science fiction, I have seen every Star Wars film and quite a bit of Star Trek. I could tell you all about the wonderful worlds of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books, and if you really wanted to kill an entire day, you should ask me about superheroes. After all of the science fiction genre I have seen, one of the most consistent names that have stood out over the years is Nimoy’s. Not because of the iconic character that he played and how that role, in a sense, helped bring the genre of sci-fi into mainstream media in the 1960s and 70s. Rather, because he was always doing something that couldn’t help but grab your attention. He was doing something that was meant to bring an immense amount of joy not only to himself but also to the public. There also was another goal that he had in mind, and that was to educate people in his own way. Star Trek, for example, was a way for people to see different ways of thinking or even to view issues that were very topical that were not set in the real world for the viewers, even Nimoy himself admitted that the show introduced him to new ways of thinking. The best example however, is Nimoy’s Twitter account, the last tweet he ever sent was a short poem he wrote that offered an interesting perspective on life about four days before his death.

A life is like a garden.

Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,

but in memory.

LLAP

Nimoy understood how important the human spirit is to the world and he lived his life in a way that best expressed that sense.

Leonard Nimoy was a celebrity, and whenever a celebrity passes away, it is a big news story. Fans everywhere typically flock to sites that are in some way connected to that celebrity or even rush to the store to get a film or album that the celebrity worked on. But when Nimoy passed, very little of that, relatively speaking, occurred. Fans knew that Nimoy was a simple man. He would have been embarrassed by the fact that a New Hampshire college student was writing an article about him and how special he was. That makes it only fitting that the best way to honor his memory, is to Live Long and Prosper, as he did. Leonard Nimoy was probably one of the most special men we will ever get to experience in our lives and possibly ever as a society. The talent and skill he had stretched far into other universes well beyond that of Star Trek. The most fitting description of Nimoy though, comes from best friend William Shatner, who played Captain James Tiberius Kirk when he said this at the funeral of Spock in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: “Of all of the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”