Bleak, black desolation".
For the outsider, the bleak brown desolation of the Gobi is not a landscape that evokes sympathy.
The Queyras National Park itself is barely visited in winter and its unique topography - a kind of high-altitude version of the Cairngorms - lends the region a bleak, beautiful desolation.
He did not elaborate, but I imagined that he might have been brooding over unfinished business with his mother, or maybe his marriage, which had grown bleaker amid the desolations of age.
Daphne du Maurier's story becomes a treatment of spiritual desolation in a bleak, wintry Venice, as two parents attempt to recover from the death of their child.
In these earlier paintings life looks relentlessly bleak, be it the cinematic desolation of a wrecked car on a blasted heath, a grey stone staircase spiralling to nowhere, or the hopeless humdrum walls of a prefab office.
Buzz Aldrin, for instance, described the lunar landscape as a vision of "magnificent desolation," a grand phrase for a bleak truth.
In its way, The Shell is as startling a piece of work as her son's bleakest recording, Black Eyed Dog: an address to the "outer desolation" we have to routinely deny in order to merely get through the day.
My husband, a glass half-empty man, adheres to a Brontë-esque notion of what constitutes a romantic landscape - bleak and wind-blasted to the point of Stygian desolation.
Set in a moral landscape that is as bleak as the North East location, by the climax the windswept urban desolation is starting to regenerate.
