Some have suggested that Perrin was envious of me and sought to detach my father from me in his last years. I refute this in the strongest terms. She had loved my mother greatly; she now loved my father dearly. Nevertheless, the depth of her feeling toward me did make me pause. I did not doubt that I was correct in my assessment of Cardassian intentions, and I did not doubt that I had needed to intervene in order to prevent my father’s policy of appeasement gaining ground. But Perrin’s anger toward me was of a different degree. I now know, of course, that she knew a great deal more about my father’s health than I did. Bendii Syndrome, which would make my father’s last few years so anguishing, does not typically exhibit itself until a Vulcan enters their third century, but sometimes there are cases of earlier onset. I wonder now whether Perrin had already glimpsed my father’s future, the forthcoming tragedy of his last days. If this is the case, then I do not hold her to fault for the ferocity of her defense of my father; indeed, I thank her.
* * *
After his marriage to Perrin, my father traveled much less often. He and Perrin took a house together in the Kir province, some five hundred kilometers away from ShiKahr, and very distant from the house in the L’langon Mountains that carried so many associations with my mother. The settlements in Kir adhere to traditional rhythms, giving day-to-day life a calm and steady routine. Yet the landscape is violent. The province sits close to Mount Tar’hana, an active volcano that regularly steams and bubbles. The vast lava fields of the Fire Plains—once the natural defense of the province against encroaching armies—spread out not five kilometers from my father’s villa. A controlled surface; turbulence beneath: I believe that I can see what the attraction might have been to my father. Here he settled into a steady routine: meditation; reading; writing; conversing with Perrin. They had few visitors. On occasion, he would come out of retirement to perform some diplomatic duty, but it was plain that he wished to be left in peace in Kir. Perrin was his chief companion; his aides, Mendrossan and Sakkath, who had been with him for many years, increasingly handled public-facing requests.
My father seems to have devoted a significant proportion of his time to rituals surrounding the kal rekk and the tal-shanar. These two ancient festivals have fallen more or less into obscurity across most of Vulcan, although each year the two holidays are observed, and most people perform some small rituals. Kal rekk may be translated as “atonement” or “penance”: a day spent in reflection upon lapses in logic or emotional control. A day of fasting and self-denial. The tal-shanar is one of our most ancient holidays, involving, in part, a meditation on our violent past. Very few off-worlders have observed these full ceremonies. And while these holidays are, as I say, limited to a day or two during the year, in Kir one will find considerably more meticulous practice. My father’s daily meditations and observance turned substantially towards matters of lapses in emotions and our violent past.
I wonder whether the intricacy of the daily routine helped in some way to slow the onset of Bendii Syndrome. For any Vulcan, this condition would be a great trial. For a man as complex, as deeply feeling, and as devoted to maintaining control as my father, it was particularly cruel. Observing his decline must have been terrible: I was spared that. But I think often of Perrin, unable to alleviate his distress; of Mendrossan, desperately trying to ensure that my father’s condition was not revealed; of Sakkath, bearing an increasingly difficult burden in quietly attempting to alleviate my father’s distress. Of course, I hardly need tell this to you, of all people: you experienced the whole firsthand. The anger, the weariness, the regrets and despair. But most of all, Jean-Luc, I believe you experienced the passion, and the love.
At many times during my life, particularly in my early years, I hungered for emotional intimacy with my father. When I was very young, I came to believe that this was a fault in me: that this simple wish alone was evidence of some deficit in my nature. As I matured, it became easier to locate the fault within my father, to convince myself that the man was simply not capable of emotional depth. But this was not borne out by the evidence of my own eyes: the continuing devotion of my mother, his pleasure in her presence. Throughout my life, then, much about my father remained a mystery to me, a conundrum: a man of seemingly limitless logic and self-control, who seemed to have excised feeling and indeed the need for feeling, and yet who commanded the love of a woman of great emotional range and depth. It seems almost remarkable to me now that I never grasped a simple truth about the world: how deeply my father’s emotions ran. But then, we never spoke of such things, and I was not near him, when he died.
Do I regret not seeing my father one last time before his death? I do not. I would not have wanted to see him as he was in those last days, wholly overtaken by emotion, unable to control himself, but I would have come in an instant, had he asked for me. I think of my mother, keeping him away in her last days, and I wonder whether this was in his mind too. The more pertinent point is that I do not believe that he would have wanted me to see him in such a condition. There was a moment, when you told me of my father’s death, when I feared that he had died believing me a traitor; for dispelling that notion alone, I would be grateful to you. But my gratitude to you is far greater than that, Jean-Luc. By allowing my father to mind-meld with you, and then in turn permitting me to meld with you, I learned more about my father than I had ever known throughout decades of being his son.
In those encounters that we shared, my father and I came closer than we had ever been in life. When our minds met, through yours, I understood him completely. Vulcan is a dry world, Jean-Luc, making water very precious to us, something over which great and bloody battles had been fought during our terrible past. I see my father now as being in possession of a deep well, around which battlements had been carefully raised, in defense of which great battles were constantly being fought. When our three minds met, I felt at last the great swell of love that my father had for all of us—for his three children, for my mother, for the family and world that had formed him. I felt at last the ocean of feeling within him, how easily storms gathered; how much he feared their violence, how much he feared a deluge. When the three of us met together, my mind to your mind, your mind to his, I saw the truth of my father as he was, not the man that I had made him in my imagination.
The burden of our history weighed heavily upon Sarek, I see now. Not simply the fact of our illustrious ancestors, but the horror and terror of our past. As a small child, I too had felt a similar burden—staring into those marbled faces of my ancestors, learning a history of suffering and agonies, escaped only through discipline and self-mastery. I wonder now, to what extent these feelings were a projection of my father’s emotions upon me. But I, at least, had some escape valve. There was the simple fact of my other background, such that, whenever my sense of self as Vulcan felt unsure, I was able to find safe harbor in my human heritage. I learned to feel—and call it human. The part of me that, as the years passed, I learned was not weakness, but, when combined with my Vulcan education, was the source of great gifts. Yet this was not the case for my father. He was indisputably, undeniably Vulcan; perhaps the most Vulcan of us all. His logic, flawless; his self-control, limitless. And yet, at the same time he was cursed—or blessed—with deep sensitivity, a wealth of emotion which, throughout his whole life, he struggled to contain and master, until, in the end, he could not. The walls crumbled. After that came the flood.
* * *
You might be asking yourself whether my father produced a t’san a’lat. The answer is—yes, of course. The original manuscript, which he wrote by hand in the traditional way, is held in the archive of the T’Plana-Hath Historical Museum in ShiKahr. A holographic version is readily available for any visitor to examine. Perrin and I agreed that a copy should be made, and this was done, and sent to Earth, where it is held in the archive at the Centre for Vulcan Studies, a research establishment located in Oxford. They are beautiful volumes, Jean-Luc: the paper made from the fiber of kah’lit vines cultivat
ed for this purpose in the grounds of our home in the L’langon Mountains, that part of Vulcan which my mother loved best. The whole is written in his distinctive, miniscule, and meticulous handwriting. Sarek’s t’san a’lat is a completely faithful record of his days. It documents, with great care and in considerable detail, the profound and deep life of his mind: his readings of Surak; his daily meditative practice; the occasions in his work where logic was brought to bear upon diplomacy. Yes, one would not doubt that the author of this text was Sarek son of Skon. When I read it, it was as if I could hear his voice speaking to me once again—attentive, measured, and precise.
You note that I call the account “faithful”—perhaps you are wondering whether I could call it “full”. There is, in this t’san a’lat, little mention of family—one might easily not register that this was a man who married three times, who was the father of two sons and a daughter. Sarak maintained his silence about Michael until death, but his other children barely figure in his book. Would I call this account dishonest, then? You will recall how I have said that a t’san a’lat must tell no lies. And—no, I would not call this t’san a’lat dishonest. The love that lay at the core of my father was so deeply felt, so protected, that he himself did not have words to express the whole of it. That his love often went unspoken—and, in this public document, went unwritten—is the truest reflection of the man that was. But each word expresses to me—who was his son—how profoundly he loved my mother; how deeply he loved his children.
Perrin and I did not get the chance to reconcile. I regret this, since I remain deeply grateful to her for the care and kindness that she gave both my parents at the end of their lives, and I believe my father’s absence would have brought us closer together. Loss can be a powerfully cohering force. I was elsewhere for many years, on Romulus, and when at last I was able to return to Federation, she was long dead. At this time, my father’s papers came into my possession. I opened them with some trepidation; I feared that, in her desire to protect him, Perrin might have considered it her duty to destroy some of what was there. In this I did her a great injustice: every note, every scrap, had been carefully kept, and she had in no way taken it upon herself to shape his posthumous reputation. These decisions she had most scrupulously bequeathed to me, his surviving child, his heir.
Everything was in very good order, and much as one might expect. Meticulous minutes taken during meetings; notes for speeches and other occasions; a diary detailing appointments and engagements. Correspondence going back over nearly two centuries. Documents such as these, including his completed t’san a’lat, were of great public interest, and therefore rightly in the hands of the Archive in ShiKahr. But there was also a wealth of personal information, not least letters to and from my mother; to and from myself and my other siblings; many holo-images of us all across the years. I found a journal, dating back across decades, reflecting upon his daily meditations, which was surprisingly frank—and deeply moving—particularly when it documented his struggles to maintain this discipline toward the end of his life. There was some very old correspondence between Sarek and Skon, written when my father was a young man, cool and distant and always formal. And, hidden away, I found a handwritten volume, filled with notes, containing the love poetry that my father wrote to my mother.
I recognized the form immediately: the harrekh, that deceptively simple three-line verse developed in later life by Ghett Iloja, so spare as to be almost seditiously un-Cardassian, relying upon concrete images rather than symbols, and rebelliously describing personal—not communal—emotion. I could see why my father was drawn to write in this way. Specific, meditative, and yet suggesting a deep well of profoundly felt emotion; such a form was suited to Sarek of Vulcan. Here, in the pages of this book, in a style learned from an alien in exile, my father found a way to tell my mother how much he loved her. Whether she ever read these poems, I do not know—I shall never know. I suspect that she did not; I suspect that she never even knew they existed. Perrin read them, no doubt; I cannot begrudge her that, and I am grateful for all the good sense she showed in her care of my father in his last and difficult years, and the compassion she showed, despite our disagreements, in leaving this book for me to find. To learn that throughout his whole life, my father wrote poetry was simultaneously one of the startling discoveries of my life and yet also no surprise. The love of a Vulcan man for a human woman, written in the form of a Cardassian verse. It is only when we step beyond the narrow constraints imposed upon us by our cultures and admit to ourselves our connection to the great and wondrous variety of the universe, that we are most fully realized.
Red world, blue world.
What strange new world is born
Of our perfect union?
These are the last words my father wrote to my mother. The date on the page is the day after her death. His papers tell me he did not write poetry for anybody else, and did not write poetry again.
Picard
IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE THAT A MAN WHOM I HAVE MET IN PERSON only once is the one that knows more about me than anyone other than my mother, or else the two men with whom I shared the best years of my life. Yet such is the case with you, Jean-Luc. In our mind-meld, I revealed to you as much of myself as I could in the time available, and I learned from you perhaps more than you are aware. I learned, of course, all that you experienced during your connection to my father: the deep confusion and distress of his last days; his anger and despair; the depth of his love for me and my mother; and his regret at how he was unable to show us that love, that tenderness which lay at the very heart of him.
My father never offered to meld with me, and I would not have dared to presume to make such an offer. I envied you this, I must speak truly, but this envy is outweighed by my gratitude. Knowing at second hand all he felt during his illness—I am not sure I could have borne the weight of that. I could not have provided this service to him. My thankfulness to you in acting as this buffer for him, to enable him to complete his final mission with assurance and dignity, is profound. My gratitude that you were willing to share this with me in turn I can hardly express. To experience in full what I had always instinctively known about my father—the extent and profundity of his emotional life—was a great gift. He could not—he would not—have told me any other way.
There is another reason that I am grateful. You must have known, when you offered to share this with me, that you were sharing more than a little of yourself. You are a private man, Jean-Luc, and do not allow others easy access to your inner life. Let me say no more, then, that I understand how it is to be a son held at arm’s-length, and yet, at the same time, to be the focus for great pride and intense expectation. I understand the strains and the confusion that this causes, not to mention the quiet wounds arising from having a father unable to demonstrate his love. I have found, throughout the course of my life, that there is great consolation in meeting a fellow traveler upon the road, in realizing that someone else has experienced the same as you, has felt the same as you, has suffered the same sorrows and regrets. In fellow feeling, in compassion, we continue our own healing. I hope that when our minds met, you found the same.
There are many other ways in which our lives seem to me to be interwoven, not least the preoccupation, in our later years, with the question of Romulus. Yet somehow, even there, we have always been out of step with each other. My years in Romulan space did not overlap with yours; your mission was carried out in the open while mine was, by necessity, clandestine for most of the time I was on Romulus. When at last I returned to Federation space, you had left on your own great mission, and, after your return, I had a new matter concerning me—a matter which I hope shortly to explain. I have deeply valued our communications over the years. I believe that there is a great deal more that we could have taught each other. My knowledge of the Romulan Empire comes chiefly from the time before the news of the impending supernova, and almost all of the friends and contacts that I made in those years are dead. You are much bette
r informed about the new dispensation, and such information might still be of use to me. Yes, I should have come to see you, but time is running so very short…
I believe, too, that there might have been something that I could have taught you. I understand, as you shall see, how useless one feels, how distraught, when a mission to which one has dedicated many years is brought abruptly and violently to a close. I understand the experience of finding oneself—in one’s latter years, when the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime is at its greatest, when one has, perhaps, more to offer than ever before—removed cruelly from active life, cast to one side, and left without apparent purpose. Yes, I understand this very well. My mission to Romulus, as I understood it at the time, ended in complete failure, at the cost of the lives of very many people. So, yes, I could have sympathized, Jean-Luc, with the loss and the grief, the bereavement, the sense of uselessness, the sense of an ending. I understand this, very well.
We will not now meet in the sun in your garden to drink your wine, share the stories of our long lives and consider whatever wisdom we have gathered along the way. We shall not meet again, my mind to your mind. But I would tell you one last thing, if I may presume. I would tell you that one can and does find purpose again, and quite unexpectedly. When all seems finished, when all seems lost—I want you to know that the mission of our lives continues, well beyond expectation, well beyond the death of hope. Do not despair, Jean-Luc. Your days are not yet done.
The Autobiography of Mr. Spock Page 19
