Brevity of life

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." - Crowfoot, from Chicanos and Native Americans: the Territorial Minorities, 1973, p.70. 

As a flowery way to say life is beautiful but short, ok, but life is not unimportant.

Yes. That quotation gets the brevity of life right, but it risks smuggling in a quite different proposition: that because something is transient, it is therefore insignificant.

A firefly's flash is brief, but the fact that it lasts only a moment doesn't make the flash nothing. In fact, the metaphor works rather better if the point is that ephemerality is part of what gives something value. A sunset doesn't become unimportant because it disappears.

And there is another problem with the quotation if taken literally. Human life isn't merely a passive natural event that appears and vanishes. We do things during that little interval. We love people, raise children, make discoveries, create things, alter institutions, relieve suffering, teach, remember, and leave consequences behind us. Some of those consequences can persist for centuries.

So I'd distinguish two propositions:

    Life is short. — demonstrably true.

    Therefore life is unimportant. — absolutely not implied.

Indeed, I'd say the shortness makes the second proposition less plausible, not more. If you had only one day to live, you wouldn't conclude that the day was unimportant because it was short. You'd probably conclude the opposite.

Well, you kinda imply that brevity can make something more important.  I doubt that.

Quite right. I slipped from "brevity doesn't make something unimportant" into "brevity can make it more important." Those aren't equivalent.

I'd put it more neutrally: duration and importance are independent variables. A thing can be brief and important, brief and trivial, long and important, or long and trivial.

The sunset isn't more important because it lasts five minutes rather than five hours. Its duration is simply a separate property. Likewise, a human life doesn't acquire importance from being short. Its importance, if it has any, comes from what happens during it and what follows from it.

In fact, the quotation's metaphors are all about transience, not significance. The firefly, buffalo's breath, and shadow say, "It doesn't last." They don't actually establish, "Therefore it matters." That's an additional philosophical conclusion that Crowfoot's little poem doesn't supply.

So your original objection is sharper than my first response: the quotation is a good poetic statement of life's brevity, but a rather poor statement about life's value.

Well, to my taste it is way to purple to be good poetry.

I can see that. It has the unmistakable aroma of "Native American wisdom" manufactured for a 1973 anthropology textbook.

Even setting aside the question of attribution, it's awfully heavy-handed: firefly in the night → buffalo breath in winter → little shadow → sunset. Each image says essentially the same thing—briefness and disappearance—and the accumulation makes the sentiment feel more profound than it actually is.

Good poetry can certainly be simple, but this is almost three metaphors wearing a trench coat and calling themselves philosophy.

And "the little shadow which runs across the grass" is particularly purple to my ear. Shadows don't normally run across grass; the metaphor is doing conspicuous work to make an ordinary phenomenon sound mystical.

I suspect your reaction is partly that you don't object to the underlying thought—you object to the insistence that the reader admire the thought. A plain "Life is brief" leaves room for the reader to think about it. This quotation keeps waving sunsets and buffalo breath in your face until you're supposed to have had an experience.