Leonard Nimoy…and The Weight of Glory

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" 

Leonard Nimoy, 1931-2015

 

This is Leonard Nimoy's final tweet. (LLAP = Live long and prosper). This deeply thoughtful man died today. His thoughts here, so close to the end of his mortal life, strikes me as remarkably similar to what CS Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory. 

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory 

All the most beautiful, the most meaningful, the most sacred of all we can experience here on Earth, in the end, is transient and fleeting. It is a temporary and vastly incomplete glimpse of what Jesus has in store for us in Heaven.

So sad that Mr. Nimoy passed today. But I'm grateful to have known him from a distance.