Vastation -- this word sticks with me although I hardly ever use it.  I found myself using it tonight.

Henry James Sr. had a "vastation" that changed his life.  Wikipedia quotes James describing it as

a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.

More on this part of James's life:

James's "vastation" initiated a spiritual crisis that lasted two years, and was finally resolved through the thorough exploration of the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish scientist, religious visionary and teacher, and mystic, who held that "We are part of one another; the crime of one is the crime of all; the virtue of one is the virtue of all."

I didn't personally experience a vastation today, and I certainly hope you didn't either. Vastations can be avoided through human contact -- James was sitting alone, staring into the fire, when he had his.

==Lots of human contact last night, at the warmest chamber music concert I can remember.  Apparently the air conditioning in the Baryshnikov Arts Center has been a problem from the beginning.  It was like attending a very serious event in a rain forest -- everyone was dripping, but steadfastly paying attention.  Soprano Lucy Shelton (miraculous) doing George Crumb's Walt Whitman cycle, "Apparition," and Brahms's Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet.  It got hotter and hotter; the string players kept having to re-tune, and ladies in the crowd fanned themselves with their programs; motions seemed slow and gluey.  All credit to the audience for staying in their seats.  The key:  it was a free concert complete with complimentary glasses of wine and little round tables for seating.  Vastation is impossible in such a setting, however warm the room.