One cannot dismiss the impression that this is a kind of technical term, perhaps denoting a place or circumstance in which

its desperate, hopeless, or terrifying quality

is somehow inducive of a breakthrough in awareness, permitting its inhabitant to shed the

conventional worldly aspirations [that] have[, in his or her case,] become devastated by grim reality[.]

Compare the similar discourse in the unattributable Writing {The Land Where No Man Is}.