deadness

"There's a deadness in people's eyes that really means they don't look real," says Louise.

Yet the sheer deadness of Mars over the past few billion years could make it easier to reconstruct its early history.

It was the deadness of so many weekends in American downtowns only multiplied and deepened.

So when David left with my father and mother, and then later the dog disappeared, I assumed he had gone looking for David, through the gap into the deadness.

Polite taste is a scourge of home design, an aesthetic flattening that has led to a kind of visual deadness, a forfeiture of personality for acceptability.