Now Playing: Felix Mendelssohn, "Symphony No. 4 in A Major," "Con Moto Moderato".

I've been collecting words this week. I was reading Walter Benjamin for Honors and senior project, as well as talking to Rachel and Alyson, the combination of which resulted in these fine specimens.

Sesquipedalian: Describing words a foot-and-a-half long, from Horace. As Rachel pointed out, this word is self-defeating. You can't accuse someone of being sesquipedalian without being it yourself.

Chthonic: Underground. It makes me think of submarine things that have become subterranean, round ammonite fossils and tiny limestone shells.

Phantasmagoria: An exhibition of optical illusions chiefly produced by a magic lantern. Not even the Oxford English Dictionary knows where it comes from, so the word itself is phantasmagoric, a combination of unusual or strange elements. The first part is Greek, but the second part might be Greek or French or the invention of someone wanting a word that sounded fantastic.

I was reading Perelandra today while I was practicing my flute (yes, the two go together, which is why I'm an English major and not a music major). As the Green Woman says at the beginning, stepping out of time and looking at oneself from the Alongside is rather a strange habit that we earth-dwellers have. I seem to have had trouble doing it these last few months, at least with the quiet calm contemplative attitude, too busy either worrying or working to step out for a moment and consider.

We had an absolutely glorious thunderstorm in Tulsa Wednesday night. When I emerged from working in the library at five o'clock in the evening, a huge cloud was rearing along the western horizon between the sky and the setting sun, its edge gilded white and gold from the sun behind it. The wind was swirling round the corner of the library. For some reason, because of the way the library is built, it always seems to be blowing up at you from the doorway, which is on a level below the ground.

Then when Nicole and I left The Hut a couple of hours later, the pavement was damp and the air moist. We were standing outside her apartment talking when a blue flash of lightning lit the sky, and we hightailed it to our separate apartments. Rachel and I spent the rest of the evening studying in our apartment and watching the storm as it came in two separate "events". The second one was more violent and prolonged than the first. Cascades of rain blew over the roofs of the apartments; the streetlamps outside rocked with the force of the wind; lightning staggered the darkness.

The next day, it was crisp and clear and very windy from the northwest, and ever since then it's been blowing colder and colder, stripping the leaves from the trees against a vivid blue sky. Intense sunshine dazzles through what leaves are left.

Today I had an extra flute lesson, the first of a set of extra lessons that will be happening on Friday mornings. Bach and Vivaldi are both at the stage where they require mostly large-scale practice, so today the professor and I started on Blavet. Fussy French music, like Versailles, all ornament with very little underneath. Whenever I play the crisp shining little trills and appoggiaturas, I see those gardens and gilded facades.