Good morning Hank it's Tuesday I really liked your video about shooting stars, and seeing
streaks of light at nighttime reminded me that it is firefly season here in Indiana,
and today I’d like to tell you about my complicated relationship with fireflies, or
as I called them as a child, lightning bugs. So I always thought of fireflies as a singular
thing, but in fact around the world there are over 2,000 species of these soft-bodied,
luminescent beetles. Some glow with amber light,
some with green, some with yellow.
They can tell each other apart by the pattern and color of their flashes.
Some species even glow in sync with one another, so that entire trees full of fireflies look
like Christmas trees with lights blinking on and off. Some fireflies are predators--
in fact, members of the firefly family photoris will mimic the light patterns of other species
of fireflies, so as to attract and eat them. Here in Indianapolis, there are dozens of
species of fireflies. One, the Say's Firefly, became the state insect of Indiana in 2018.
Indiana's Department of Natural Resources released a statement pointing out that Say's
Firefly is a true Indiana native, whereas, and I'm quoting here, "Many other states have
state insects that are not native to their areas," a diss presumably intended for our
neighboring state of Ohio, which chose as their state insect the seven-spotted ladybug,
an invasive species introduced to the United States in 1973.
But I’m not here to talk about Ohio’s dubious selection of state symbols; I’m
here to talk about fireflies, which are, of course, absurdly wonderful.
The problem with fireflies, though, is that they are so obviously and ostentatiously beautiful that they can
be a little cheesy. I remember once in high school I was outside with a friend and she
commented on how the fireflies were really lovely and I said, “Well, but they're a little
lame, though,” and she paused for a moment before saying, “What is wrong with you?”
What was wrong with me was that I was afraid
to experience unironized emotion, afraid that if I gave in to the phenomenal beauty of
fireflies, I would seem childish or naive or worst of all that I would be seen as innocent
and vulnerable. I was right to worry about that—I knew by then that it is not only
carnivorous fireflies that lure in the innocent and vulnerable only to hurt them.
So when I was a kid, fireflies were an example to me
of the world’s strangeness and beauty, of the absolute astonishment that life exists
at all, let alone in such bizarre abundance. In my teens and twenties, fireflies represented
to me a beauty I needed to protect myself against feeling too much or too directly,
lest I drown in either misguided nostalgia or the flood of emotion I was always trying
to dam up within myself. But now, they mean something else to me. What gets me about fireflies
these days is that they make their own light. I mean, they get their energy from the Sun just
like the rest of us do, and so in a way their light is sunlight, just like all Earth
light is. But still, fireflies make light where otherwise there wouldn’t be any.
Hank, you told me recently that there are planets in the universe that orbit no star,
planets that are hurtling through the vast and empty places between solar systems. On
those planets, you explained, everything is very dark all the time. And when I asked you if there
might be life on these planets, and you explained that yes, perhaps if there are geological
temperature differentials or something, there might be energy that could be captured and
used to fuel some kind of life. And then you said, “But there wouldn't be any light,
though,” before pausing and adding, “Oh, unless they make it themselves.” And I found
that possibility, however distant, quite encouraging. So, here’s to celebrating light where we find it,
and making light where we don’t. Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.