Lightening Bolts

(This is a bit of a longish essay, but I quite like it, and hope you'll be so good as to read it. )

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Flash. More specifically, I'm intrigued by the story of how he obtained his powers. This bit of modern mythology unfolds as follows: Barry Allen is a twenty-four year old police scientist who laments the fact that he is hopelessly slow at completing work, at making appointments, and at making a move on Iris, the object of his affections. He has wished, since childhood, that he could be the fastest man alive. One stormy night, a lightning bolt crashes through the window into his laboratory, hits a shelf of beakers, and showers Barry in a flood of now-electrified chemicals. Somehow, instead of being electrocuted, Barry is granted the ability to move at super-speed, an ability which he decides to turn to the benefit of mankind by donning red tights and fighting crime as The Flash.

This is a fairly well-known story to most students to modern pop culture. However, one version of the story adds an intriguing twist to the Flash’s origin. In writer Robert Loren Fleming’s re-imagining of the tale (published in Secret Origins Annual #2), the lightening bolt destined to hit Barry freezes in mid-air – and speaks to him. It explains that Barry has a choice to make: he can stand in the path of the lightening bolt and become the quicksilver he’s always wanted to be, or he can avoid the bolt and continue his dull, snail-paced existence. When Barry asks for some proof that the bolt will not kill him, the spear of energy cautions that “nothing in life is certain,” and that Barry is “free to choose his own destiny.” It also explains that, should Barry live and gain super-speed, his life will be shortened by a considerable number of years in the process. Despite the sacrifices involved in the deal, isn’t this what the young scientist has always wanted, more than anything?

The situation is a wonderful allegory for those big decisions in life we’re all confronted with at one time or another. More specifically, it suggests the scary challenge of realizing your own potential. Are you willing to do what it takes to become the most fully-realized version of yourself possible? These questions are particularly germane to those of us in our twenties, when we feel the pressure of making decisions that will shape the course of our lives and who we will be for much of them. Should I switch jobs? Should I get married to this person? Is it a good idea to move? Barry Allen is twenty-four when he’s forced to make a life-altering decision, and many of us experience the same thing at his age. Barry hesitates.

I’ve done some hesitating of my own. The only thing I can say I ever really dreamed of becoming was an English professor. I began an M.A./PhD in English, but stopped after completing the master’s, having heard more than enough horror stories of underemployed academics searching years for that elusive tenure-track position. Feeling that I didn’t have the resources to gamble a few years of my life on the slim chances of finding a post-secondary teaching position, I decided that teaching at the high school level would be a far less risky option.
But although I’ve come to hold high school teaching in incredibly high esteem, I still feel that some of my personal strengths rest in the kind of work English professors do: connecting and summing up ideas (as opposed to the more disciplined teacherly work of breaking those ideas up into discrete, accessible units that students can learn piece-by-piece). For this and other reasons, I sometimes think that, if I had a lightening bolt of my own, it might whisper to me, “go complete your PhD and become the man you’ve always wanted to be. But be warned, should you live and gain a doctorate, you will have lost several years of your life in the process.” In the face of such a decision, I’ve hesitated.

And like I said, Barry hesitates too. He wonders if he will live through the process, and what he stands to lose if he does. The notion that the whole super-speed deal is a “miracle with strings attached” that will shorten his life is tough to swallow. But Barry takes a gamble, places the jar of ammonium sulfate on the chemical cabinet, and (after recovering from the force of the ensuing electro-chemical blast) finds himself zipping around his native Central City faster than any man alive.

But here’s the really novel bit of Fleming’s version of the story. The Flash’s greatest challenge occurs when the villain named the Anti-Monitor threatens to destroy the universe with a weapon powered by a faster-than-light tachyon particle. In order to deactivate the weapon, the Flash has to run fast enough to capture the tachyon particle. As he races towards the crackling ball of energy, our hero breaks the light-speed barrier and becomes a being of pure energy in the process. As he successfully stops the deadly particle, his form continues to change mysteriously. In the last few panels of the story, Barry’s super alter-ego is shown gradually taking on the shape of a lightening bolt, about to touch down somewhere in Central City. The final full-page panel shows Barry Allen running from his lab, out into the horizon –he’s just been hit by the lightening bolt he always eventually becomes. In this version of the story, Barry is the lightening bolt, the source of his own transformation.

I think I have some lightening bolts of my own – possibilities that have dangled themselves out in front of me, difficult questions begging to be taken up. I was in my fourth year of university when I decided that I wanted to attend graduate school and pursue my M.A./PhD. I had to collect reference letters as part of my application package, and I asked the professor from my sophomore Satire class, Julia Creet, to write one of the letters. I distinctly remember the moment I caught up to her, in the concrete wind-tunnel gap between the Stong and Bethune college buildings. I asked her, nearly breathlessly, whether she would be willing to write the letter, and she conceded gracefully to do so. I walked away contentedly, but just before I was out of conversation range, Professor Creet turned her head and called out over her shoulder to me, with as much earnestness as a Satire professor can muster. “Are you sure you want to teach English? It’s not the most lucrative way to make a living.”

I was sitting down the other day in a coffee shop when I remembered this moment again. Having finished two degrees in English, spent a year teaching English for far too little money in a private school in Pittsburgh, then spent (wasted?) another year running snot-nosed and broken-walleted after a Bachelor of Education degree so that I could teach English in a public school, Professor Creet’s question struck me with all the force of a proverbial lightening bolt. But much like the one that struck Barry Allen, the source and effect of my lightening bolt is more than a little peculiar. First, the source: I admired Professor Creet a great deal, both for her mastery of the body of literature she professed and for running the most thought-provoking, energetic, exciting tutorial discussions I had ever sat in on. Whenever I think of the kinds of discussions I want to have with students, I think of the chats we all had in her classroom. If Prof. Creet had any doubts about having spent her life becoming a professor...well, she had almost created another one in me. It’s probably a bit of a platitude to say that every great teacher spawns another one (or at least someone hopeful of becoming a great teacher), but it’s true.

Second, the effect. Although Prof. Creet meant to strike a subtle, sarcastic cautionary note with her question, I plunged on ahead into the literary/academic life. It turns out she was entirely correct. I own depressingly little: my wealth consists mostly of experiences and books and quotes just right for any occasion. But sitting in the coffee shop (the living room of the dispossessed) that day, I realized I didn’t care too much about my typical literati’s lack of lucre. In fact, inspired by Barry’s lightening bolt, I was excited by the thought that I might become the source of the things that have transformed me: that I might write out thoughts profound, to make someone think “I never thought that before”; that I might help a student or two believe there are arguments that cannot be proven and spirits that cannot be broken so long as you can invest yourself in something besides the acquisition of wealth.

Like my old hero, I ran off out of the coffee shop, into the horizon.