bleakness

Our beginning-of-the-year customs go hand in hand with its bleakness as we choose to make ourselves more cheerless by abstaining from things we enjoy, while pushing ourselves towards the more mundane and less exciting.

The color palette, moving from dark to light and back again, charts a precise course into lyrical bleakness.

Beckett might have a reputation for bleakness, but he was also a sporting man who loved rugby, cricket, tennis, attractive women, male friendship and good whiskey.

“No false tone of healing or hope is sounded at the end; instead, the circles of complicity keep widening. What rescues the opera from utter bleakness is the inherent beauty of Saariaho’s writing.”

“The bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye and ear for detail,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the New York Times in 1986.