Part of what appealed to her about donating a kidney was the concreteness of it: she knew that she was helping someone, and she knew exactly how.
That's not what most of us have anymore, but it is impossible to read this passage without thinking of the inherited vigor of English literature — the sheer, knotty concreteness of it, sometimes rude, always robust — from Chaucer on down.
What sets Grossman's novel apart is not its abstractions but the satisfying concreteness of his metaphors.
The metaphor in Pentland's title, "Social Physics," is meant to express the extraordinary concreteness of his data, which — unlike the data captured by Facebook or Google — is rooted in your physical actions: in what you do, rather than what you say.
Richard Eyre compared this book to Chekhov and Shakespeare, an enthusiasm presumably prompted by the variety and colour of Verghese's world, its earthiness and drama, its concreteness of detail and unselfconscious swing.
What account can be given to ground the asymmetry between the permanence of concreteness and its contingency?
When I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam several years ago, the somber concreteness of the Annex and the dread fate of its inhabitants were nearly erased by a final multimedia display in which the Holocaust was calculatedly eclipsed by invocations of every contemporary example of racial and social injustice the museum could formulate.
Bypassing the "concreteness" of day-to-day life, it delves straight back into the instinctual, primordial stew of the id.
But it is a concreteness of sounds, word, letters and feelings.
Perhaps it was the concreteness of their symptoms that motivated them, but they have both made steady progress getting their diabetes under control.
