Word: bleakness
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...gudgeon, commanded by a cultured swashbuckler from Nova Scotia, a hammer-fisted, hell-bent "bluenose" skipper, with Nietzschean ethics, Vulcanic muscles, the passions of Poseidon, the luck of Lucifer. When his clipper Aphrodite goes down off Patagonia, this skipper's redemption is made cinema-credible by a bleak, briny coast, driving rain, starvation and the steadfastness of a childhood sweetheart...
...bleak but fertile plains of Manitoba at dawn and dusk. Over them a short but beamy shag-pate, Caleb Gare, walking as though bent against a wind, whispering greedily to his black acres, caressing his blue-flowered flax in secret, eyeing his sows by lantern-light. In his cabin, a wife and children dulled and spavined by the cruel toil he holds them to with a miser's malice. Jude Gare, the one stalwart, deep-breasted daughter, who defies him, she having heard the wild geese honking down the high heavens. The night of Jude's escape, prairie...
...years he played checkers and told jokes to gay people who sat around in little red cottages by a bleak northern lake and coughed into their handkerchiefs. Then, almost well again, and mocked by the irony of the disease that increases a man's keenness for living while depriving him of life, he bought a part interest in the Boston Braves. Overwork weakened him; he caught a cold; returned to his lake...
...stage flourishes that mar his more fervid performances. Even as actors of genuine talent sometimes paw the air and mouth their lines, so Tilden permitted himself an occasional half-stagger; he took off his shoes and played in his stocking feet; he poured buckets of ice-water over his bleak brow. However crude his technique in indicating to the gallery that he was a beaten man, it had its undeniable effect. Women murmured sympathetically. Men gnawed their lips. Lacoste determined...
...Bleak, truly, is the lot of any lavatory man, but bleaker still if he is a lavatory man employed by the U. S. Government. Nor are lavatory men alone in their exigency. Federal attendants of all sorts, guards in zoos and biological gardens, seneschals in museums and the gray-faced individuals of nameless profession who patrol at intervals the hollow echoing corridors of public libraries ? all are underpaid, all are overworked...