War and Peace vocabulary

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As the air becomes rarefied in proportion to its distance from the earth, the lungs of the workmen would have collapsed, and their blood have congealed, before they climbed half-way to the top. They could not have breathed at such a height.

Kersey and Lydia Graves. The Bible of Bibles (1879)

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the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge

George Eliot. Middlemarch

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the atmosphere of the house became breathable once more. I felt that, instead of a rarefied air, it was happiness that filled it.

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 5]

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she noticed the tension of the passengers, the military preparations in the towns along the line, and an atmosphere rarefied by the certainty that something serious was going to happen,

Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude, p.319 (1970)

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For the first semester, I was one of three Black students in the school, and in that rarefied atmosphere I came to love my people more.