abysm

It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the 'dark backward and abysm of time.' I can still reread it with delight.

(22) The comparison was probably inspired by these beautiful lines, written by Anna Maria Ortese: "Liguria (...) is intact and silent like a monster of the abysms who rests with its head on the continent and its back covered with seaweeds; it is anchored somewhere and cannot move.

The higher parts, between 1,250 to 1,400 m., comprise altitude fields surrounded by breathtaking rock abysms ornamented by large populations of bromeliads, orchids and cacti.

In "The Ancient Sage" Tennyson provides in "the abyss of all abysms" a basement for the mind's free fall through space.

Dostoevsky, Berdyaev further observes, "prepared souls for this remaking and fiery baptism: he sweetens the ground for a spiritual renaissance in which the new and eternal covenant, living Christianity, should be made manifest." In Dostoevsky, writes Berdyaev, we enter the "spiritual depths" and "the inward abysms of man." These words essentially characterize Berdyaev as a religious seeker-prophet who has wrought a universal and spiritual understanding of human existence.

Fetched from the abysms of cultural heritage and reformulated in synthetic materials, they slowly unveil their highly ambiguous symbolic meanings.

Franco Marucci, in "Walter Pater: The Forms of Modernity and the Modernity of Form," states that Mario Praz, the leading Italian critic of Pater at mid-twentieth century, "argued that Pater delighted in the macabre, and concealed under his magic prose, 'abysms of decadentism' and of repressed perversion," (2) a view that Marucci does not share.