On Birdsong

If my readers wish to understand bird-music, they must assume that birds are not automatic musical boxes, but sound-lovers, who cultivate the pursuit of sound-combinations as an art, as truly as we have cultivated our arts of a similarly aesthetic character. This art becomes to many of them a real object of life, no less real than the pursuit of food or the maintenance of a family.

                         —Walter Garstang, Songs of the Birds (1922)


Poison, in proportion, is medicinal.
Medicine, ill-meted, can be terminal.

Brute noise, deftly repeated, becomes musical.
An exit viewed from elsewhere is an entrance.
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