Word: lightless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Harvard Square felt positively arctic by comparison: the Crimson thermometer registered only 99 degrees at 1:20 p.m. And in the climate-controlled environs of Lamont and Pusey libraries, the thermometer read only 76. But in the lightless depths of the Widener Library stacks, a set of open windows prefigured a 94 degree reading...
...light to catch distant realities upon a collodion wet plate and bear them home in velvet-lined boxes to London or New York. It was a cumbersome wizardry that they practiced, lumbering across Mexico or Africa in darkroom wagons. In desert heat they crawled under layers of blankets, into lightless black bags, to change their photographic plates. When a photographer named Captain Payer was taking pictures in Egypt for the Viceroy in 1863, the fellahin thought that his camera was a Pandora's box, and-that his black bellows contained cholera; they smashed the whole instrument. But the rewards...
Intensive study of the creatures has provided some tantalizing hints about the bizarre life processes in this lightless world. On the earth's surface, all life, with minor exceptions, stems from the sun. Green plants, synthesizing sugars and other carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide in a sunlight-powered process called photosynthesis, provide sustenance for virtually all other living things. But in the world of the deep sea vents, there is no sun. How then do its inhabitants survive...
Dunn recently went beyond his depth, though, while trying to help a 7-ft.-long shark at San Francisco's Steinhart Aquarium. The shark, a creature of the lightless deep, was in pain near the surface. Dunn tried a pair of colored contacts that did not help, and the fish died between fittings. But Dunn still has the lenses and is hoping to find another shark...
...CHALLENGE such an overwritten characterization? Not really, though Golding descends to verbose depths more than once, at one point calling his Hell the "inchoate unorchestra of the lightless spaces." He gets away with such a weird combination of words and images only because it parallels the confusion and discomfort that his characters express in their infernal discoveries...