A dreamer could be ostracized in hate for singing songs the world had never heard. […] Only the stars and mountains knew it. But they were old. And man was new, and chained to simple, useless rhymes; thus he could not understand the majesty that settled down upon him.
—The Singer, Chapter I,
Calvin Miller
the cat, stepping out in his seven-league boots, with a 4-inch-long bright green grasshopper in his jaws. [...] It immediately began to trill, a noise that sounded as if in the body of this insect the grass had gone to emerald, sparkling like newly pressed sap. Translated through that insect intelligence, it had become music. If I had been asked to make music out of grass, I would have transcribed the movement of grass stalks, the way they sweep and weave in shadow and light over distance. I would have talked about mathematics, not about colour and sap. But then, I'm not an insect.
I stepped out into the knee-high clover and laughed and called Diane over, for the grass all around me was covered with those insects. There were hundreds of them chirping their bird-like bell tones in that small field I had let grow wild, and nowhere else.
After a couple minutes, both of the cats were prowling through the music like bad liner notes. [...] All the time, the little brass songs of the insects rose out of the grass like Adam's name for the grass itself.
—Winging Home, page 199-200
Harold Rhenisch