cold mountain

today i got asked by a reporter what my favorite book was. i am a book junkie, but this was the first thing that came to mind, so obviously it holds a special place in my heart.

i read cold mountain (charles frazier’s debut novel) when i was in college. a friend very dear to me had told me to read it, that he had thought of me when he read it.

i started, and never put it down.

while the story certainly has its appeal, the real beauty of this book is in the storytelling, something that obviously was missing from the film adaption. it’s hard for me to describe the book as a war story or a love story, though both of those are true.

for me, this book is a testament of how uncertain life can be, and how factors you have no control over can shape who you are and who you must become. in a different story, this couple would have met, courted, fallen in love, gotten married and dealt with life on the farm. this obviously is not the case, as inman is off to war and the couple is apart for most of the novel. the story is a journey back home, and a journey to discover what home is. and if you can ever go back.

there is a passage bookmarked that i open to time and time again. i know without hesitation that it’s page 433.

"She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred."

a couple other great quotes:

"We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical."

"I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter."
"I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you."
"Why not me?"

"He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."

"And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now."

"When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better."

"One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen."

"[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial."