Yet "The Road, " for all its vivid desolation, remains a curiously unmoving experience or maybe not so curious, given that nothing really happens in it.

CNN: Review: A journey down 'The Road'

Those with longer memories remember him as a film-music wizard whose scores for Paris, Texas (1984) and the Southern blues myth Crossroads (1986), among many, brought a spooky desolation to Hollywood storytelling.

NPR: Music's Renegade Historian in Rural America

The next day, Good Friday, he found the church stripped as a sign of desolation.

ECONOMIST: Cardinal Lustiger

They presented the hymnwriter as a fragile and precarious being, often poised on the brink of desolation and desperate for the deity's comforting hand.

ECONOMIST: English letters

Only then are we allowed to watch as "Ahab dropped a tear into the sea" and talks about the young wife he has left behind, the "desolation of solitude" his life has been.

WSJ: Word Craft: Ben Schrank, Author of Love Is a Canoe, on Bosses