What is "vastation"

Usage examples of "vastation".

Veil, an affirmation of the validity of that need, on another it was a run from responsibilities at home, it was a rejection of traditions, it was a vastation of her ideal of civility which was woven about a proper appreciation of place, of the value of the class system with its beautiful symmetry of interaction, class with class.

Minneapolis was an amazement of urbanity: its colossal buildings, its sumptuous stores, its swarming streets, the sheer noise, and then, beyond these ascertainable realities, the existence, surmised but wholly probable, of fairies swooping and darting through the glass-and-stone canyons, flitting above the trafficked streets, lighting in flocks on the carved facades of monolithic banks, then spiraling larklike into the azures of mid-afternoon, like a vastation of bright invisible locusts that fed not on the leaves of trees or on the potted flowers decorating the Mall but on the thoughts, the minds, the souls of all these calm pedestrians.