“What Is Life It Is the Flash of a Firefly in the Night”

“What Is Life? It Is the Flash of a Firefly in the Night” is the central passage of a longer saying Perry Smith copied into a handwritten notebook. He singled it out with red ink and a border of green stars, marking it as personally significant; its vision of life as a fleeting trace becomes a concentrated expression of his sense of human insignificance, even as the surrounding narrative shows that this outlook does not free him from worry.

The Saying in Perry’s Notebook

The passage appears in a notebook labeled The Private Diary of Perry Edward Smith, though the book clarifies that it is not a diary in the usual sense. It is an anthology of obscure facts, poems, literary quotations, and excerpts from newspapers and books, sometimes paraphrased and sometimes copied. The saying therefore sits among collected pieces of language rather than a continuous account of Perry’s days. The notebook attributes it to Chief Crowfoot, identified there as a Blackfoot Indian Chief.

A Deliberately Marked Passage

Perry did more than copy the saying: he distinguished it visually. The final entry was written in red ink and framed with green-ink stars, a deliberate emphasis that the narrative links to its “personal significance.” The full passage reads: “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” Its three images move from a brief flash, to a breath that vanishes, to a shadow absorbed by darkness. Together they make transience, rather than achievement or permanence, the passage’s governing idea.

Meaning and Counterpoint

The narrative makes the personal resonance explicit: the image of a buffalo’s breath in winter exactly evokes Perry’s view of life. It then renders that view in terms of human smallness: a person is “a mist, a shadow absorbed by shadows.” The notebook’s decoration gives the saying an importance Perry chose to make visible, while the surrounding prose interprets what that importance means.

That bleak perspective does not amount to indifference in practice. The narration immediately turns to the fact that Perry still worries, schemes, and frets over his fingernails and hotel warnings, including a notice that his day ends at 2 p.m. The contrast gives the saying its particular force: Perry can regard human life as insubstantial and still remain caught in immediate concerns. The passage is not presented as a resolution of that tension, but as a carefully preserved statement of the view through which he understands it.