A grasshopper’s whirr, trilled from his ‘dust-choked gullet’, being interpreted by the hearer, as the green creature builds and reinforces his straw home. Grasshoppers are one of my favourite insects and I choose to see them as augurs of happiness and positive developments.
‘… and dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet.’
Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 258
