But just as often the sights and sounds of nature add a brooding, willful sense of portent at odds with the stark contours of the narrative.
The increasing likelihood of a Federal Reserve interest rate increase would have been a problem a year ago, Mr. Birinyi said, but it is a positive portent at this stage, because it signals that the central bank is convinced that the economy is in good shape and will keep expanding.
"Cold Mountain" is charged with scenes of yearning and irrational faith — flickering portents glimpsed at the bottom of a well; a blind man making prophecies — yet Minghella brings off this cheesy stuff so poetically that he cuts away the mold.
Dramatic pauses in the prelude seemed weighted with portent, and at least one listener started slightly at an offstage crash and thump during the Steersman's song.
But anyone looking for better times after a miserable year — and with the crash coming on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration — might see the episode as a portent, or at least a revelatory break from a world of subprime everything.
Within a couple of weeks, the queasiness came on like a portent, though at the same time I longed for the drinks I couldn't have.
"One of the most striking features of the present chapter in stock market history," The New York Times wrote on Sept. 1, "is the failure of the trading community to take serious alarm at portents which once threw Wall Street into a state of alarm bordering on demoralization.
The rich blush when Madonna dines at Salt Water Grill and Angelina Jolie drinks at Indigo: portents, they say, that Mumbai will join New York, London, Paris in that coterie of names emblazoned on the epidermis of boutiques everywhere.
Yet whatever dread the public may have felt at these portents, Asquith's government seemed to be wholly unprepared for the coming catastrophe.
Conceptual art's passion for words -- Jenny Holzer's LED portents, now on view at the Whitney Museum; Bruce Nauman's wickedly funny neon signs; Lawrence Weiner's plain-spoken mysticism -- has often been about trying to show how mercurial language can be even as it forms our view of the world.
