A newspaper article and accompanying photograph inspired "A Tragedy in the North," a grim scene of townfolk in the Pas-de-Calais clustered near the brick buildings of a coal pit, their faces a study in blank horror, grief and stoicism.
The color white serves as a symbol of death, grief, birth, and artistic creation; Han leaves several pages in the book blank.
With purges, famine and urban destruction, Mao Zedong visited immense grief on a city he treated as a blank page.
Today, as a biting wind raced across campus, most of those students filed into Walsh gymnasium again, their youthful exuberance shadowed by grief, the most recent pages of those metaphorical blank books scored by tragedy.
But when we are in the pitch of grief — or, for that matter, in the full sunshine of joy — what form, what blank, what cause, whether final, immediate, or underlying, could possibly answer that question to anyone's satisfaction?
Coming out of the building are families, some shuffling slowly, weighed down with grief - a mother with tears on her cheeks, a father with his head bowed, his eyes blank.
Then, from Sarah, we heard stories of Sonali drinking and crazy with grief, Sonali despairing of therapists or taking trips to wild places, the Arctic, Iceland, craving cold and whiteness to blank out the pain of birthdays or anniversaries.
She went absolutely blank when she was asked to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees — even though she was prepped by some advisers to Sarah Palin, and that was a question that brought Palin to grief in 2008.
