In a recent meeting, I was asked a rhetorical and hypothetical question, "If I could choose a superpower, what would it be?" It is the type of question intended to illicit insight into one's personality and life perspective, much like the {im}famous interview question, "Why are street utility covers round?" (There are, by the way, many good reasons why utility covers are round, grounded in practicality, geometry and physics.)
Neither question is as fraught with existential ennui as the hoary, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" I struggled with variants of the latter in high school, when I was sometimes challenged to explain the putative motivations of literary characters. Sometimes there is no ethical conflict, deep seated neurosis or early trauma haunting the chicken; it's a chicken after all, an animal not known for self-awareness. Other times, the chicken is but a leaf, buffeted by the vicissitudes of the spring wind. But I digress …
When asked about superpowers, I was immediately tempted to respond with "flight," as the challenges of commuter airlines, weather delays and hub connections at O'Hare test the equanimity and sangfroid of even the most experienced traveler. (There are indeed neuroses and trauma associated with arriving at the gate, wheezing and breathless, only to be told the boarding door had been closed just a minute earlier.)
But I then realized that high-speed flight in a costume was unlikely to be comfortable, especially in adverse weather. There would be no "leaping tall buildings at a single bound" for me. And X-ray vision, that's dangerous stuff, exposing those nearby to potentially lethal radiation doses. Nor was I particularly enamored of Wolverine-like retractable claws – rather awkward and embarrassing in a business suit. Just what superpower would match my secret identity as a Balding Computer Geek™? And why are glasses sufficient to hide Clark Kent's identity? (See Comic Book Heroes and Secret Identities.) These are vexing questions.
After this momentary and whimsical reverie, I reassumed my academic mien and offered a serious response to this gedanken question. I said that I wished we all had the power to see the invisible web of intellectual connectedness that binds as a community of scholars. This consilient web of knowledge connects us across the ever widening chasm of disciplinary isolation, bifurcating intellectual cultures, and ontological divergence. It is the warp and woof of transdisciplinary unity and discovery that is both our origin story and our future.
Like talismans, objects, events, individuals and contexts are all imbued with a web of connections and referents, pregnant with intellectual opportunities – if we can only see them. Even a humble doorway speaks of the Castle Doctrine, privacy and the rule of law, and the door itself whispers the history of trade and commerce; cryptography, mathematics, and security; metallurgy, alchemy and chemistry; mechanical advantage, engineering and physics; craftsmanship, art and design; and culture, history and sociology.
The web is here, there, everywhere, if we pause to see it. That insight is the first step in finding new cliques in the great web of the known and knowable, of uniting scholars in shared quests, and building our future. That's a superpower worth having!
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