There are spots in the grasslands where the space between the grass and the sky feels infinite, or less like an infinite distance (the distance in a spatial immensity between certain identical copies of the Earth) and more like the conceptual distance between truth and soil. There are other spots where there is no distance between grass and sky; they touch or are the same. When one walks through either of these spots the air around one's body feels the same: what is felt is not an effortless glide through a medium of transition but a struggle to embed oneself into distance. For someone used to the British isles, where one can walk for a few hours and find that the accent has changed, the grasslands can feel like an ocean. But when one is in the ocean one is surrounded by it on all sides, or one is near the shore, which is a knife’s edge. There are no shores in the grasslands. Movement over land sees one gradually folded in, and the slowness and complexity of this change of state marks the plains in all their summer green as an expanse of overlapping penumbrae.
Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartets: The Weight of an Alp
Terrestrial Volume
The Absurdity of a Net