Fireflies

Fireflies

"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."

I first ran into this quote on a magnetic plate in my AP literature class in High School as I helped my professor to pack for retirement. My professor was a crazy woman. She talks to us not in words but in letters. Instead of saying “how are you”, she would occasionally surprise the class by blurting out fragmented letters in the forms of:”H-O-W-A-R-E-Y-O-U?” A couple students would catch up and converse with her in this newly invented communication method. She ties her silky brown hair in a tight bun, lets her dark framed glasses dangle and sway like a pendulum while filling our brains with ideas of Holly Golightly coaxing money from rich gentlemen, Hemingway dragging along a feast of Paris on a side table across national borders, and a lavish party host by the name of Gatsby who obsessively monitors moves of his lover like an secret agent only to end up helplessly in a pool of blood.

She also tries very hard to extend our love for literature beyond school time by relating to us a fanciful place called the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Oregon, where the menu is a table of contents and rooms are designed to match the styles of particular authors like Mark Twain, Colette, Dr. Seuss, Emily Dickinson and etc. To fully illustrate how personalized the rooms are, she carefully relates to us in a sharp tone that Agatha Christie’s room, in particular, has bullet holes, half hidden slippers, clues and mysteries that the visitors can solve and really live the surreal life of the author. When May came, she hinted to us that she has finally saved enough money to go on a world-tour, kind of explaining the sudden retirement plan. Before she left, she insisted to those who helped to organize her stuff that we could “pick something of hers to keep”. An auburn haired girl on the cheerleading team picked a poster of Audrey Hepburn. I picked the magnet with Jack Kerouac’s quote because I thought it was somehow relevant at the time partly due to the professor’s madness.

I was my freshman year at Oxford that I ran into this saying again, this time in my freshman literature class with Dr. Hawley. He enthusiastically confesses that he was a rebel in college, and that he would eat Kerouac’s books all day long in the back of the classroom and zoom out on lectures. The reason why he becomes a teacher, he says, is because he loves school and never wants to leave campus to go out to the real world. Through the fires that lit in his eyes while he talked about books, I think I got an inkling of what the quote was saying.

The third time I run into this quote was when I actually had to read On the Road in a contemporary literature at Oxford. I dropped the class early into the semester because I couldn’t figure out what to write on the topics given for the book on the first major paper. On the Road didn’t quite make sense to me at the time. It was full of random fights in bars, hangover, promiscuous sex and scenes of loud uproars. To me, it was the highest state of entropy and disorder without any connection or reasoning. I was never able to fully comprehend the mad style of carpe diem living from On the Road in which sensibilities are blunted, but something stuck to me in the end. As I thought about the book, I envisaged worker bees working together to protect the queen and fend off invaders by stinging, which directly lead to their deaths. Their “mad” moment is perhaps in the moment of the sting, in which they gave it all in their last breaths. I also envisioned the Grizzly man, Timothy Treadwell, as he battles with the very Grizzly bears that he set up to protect. I wonder what he thought about in the final moments as the bear tore off his fingers, arms and legs. Maybe his maddening expeditions are caused by the near-fatal attempts that numbed his reasons, but there is something about his work that mesmerizes me. Maybe people pursue extreme sports and activities to experience the temporary sensations of “burning”, to feel really alive amid the materialistic world of fashion, money, fame, reasons and obligations.

As I ponder about the “mad people”, I imagine a group of fireflies, dancing violently in the dark, bursting their lighted abdomens open during the climax and trailing off into the darkness again. The little glows that they pass out in their peak are not even enough to light the smallest corner in the streets, but they are "the all and everything" to the fireflies.