Last week, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section gave about 3/4 of a page to an excerpt from a book that concerns Joan Didion, the Mansons, etc. I read the excerpt distractedly, until I came to a sentence beginning "Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969..." That stopped me.
Just above my left ankle there is a scar from a mishap in the late summer of 1969. The reality that contributed to the wound was certainly tangible enough. There are plenty of other tangible encounters I remember from that summer that left no scar but were sufficiently pleasant, unpleasant, or in any case significant, to stay in the memory. I imagine that most humans born by 1963 can say the same.
If in place of "barely tangible" the author wrote "multiform and confusing", I could understand the sentence. As it stands, I can't.
