Myths are for thinking with

Storytelling is underpinned by myth. The characters in Beowulf, and in Henry James, and in Joel Schumacher's latest slam-bang movie extravaganza, all participate, with more or less elaborate variations, in archetype.

One of the first people to look into this systematically was a Russian folklorist called Vladimir Propp, whose book The Morphology of the Folk Tale sought to distil a sort of universal genome of myth. He got pretty far with it.

You don't have to be a crazed Jungian, a structural anthropologist, or a seven-basic-plots believer to agree that storytelling is something of universal importance in human experience, and something that exhibits deep and suggestive similarities across cultures.

Myths, it has been said, are "good to think with". Storytelling is a way of trying out situations imaginatively, of preserving knowledge and social value, of attesting to a commonality of experience.

Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die | Telegraph
This kind of illuminates my fascination with the Star Trek universe and the love story of Spock and Kirk that some of us see in that universe. The original Trek characters are archetypes. Not the same old archetypes of heroes from stories past, but brand new archetypes that are suitable for thinking with in modern times.