Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier

The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was
fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been
so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could
vision was a world from which everything he counted important had been
banished or had willingly fled.

    -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

He had no talent in the world but his recently discovered ability to
play the banjo, unless one counted as talent the fact that he was
gentle and kind and looked on everything that passed before him with
soft wide eyes.

   -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

Were she to decide fully to live here in Black Cove unto death, she
believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and
north points of the sun's annual swing. She owned the entire span of
ridge where the sun set through the year, and that was a thing to
savor. One had then just to mark the points in December and June when
the sun wrenched itself from its course and doubled back for another
set of seasons. Though upon reflection, she decided a tower was not
entirely needed. Only clear some trees to notch the ridge at the
turning point. It would be a great pleasure year after year to watch
with anticipation as the sun grew nigh to the notch and then on a
specified day fell into it and then rose out of it and retraced its
path. Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the
years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and
a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be
a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be
an answer to the question, Where am I?

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

She marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it
in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest
when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on
such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so
powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

His playing was easy as a man drawing breath, yet with utter
conviction in its centrality to a life worth claiming.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

This business of carrying hats halfway around the world to sell made
no sense to her. It marked a lack of seriousness in a person that they
could think about such matters. There was not one thing in a place
like France or New York or Charleston that Ruby wanted. And little she
even needed that she couldn't make or grow or find on Cold
Mountain. She held a deep distrust of travel, whether to Europe or
anywhere else. Her view was that a world properly put together would
yield inhabitants so suited to their lives in their assigned place
that they would have neighter need nor wish to travel.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth
without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You
could bury them and knife their names into an oak plank and stand it
up in the dirt, and not one thing - not their acts of meanness or
kindess or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the
features of their faces - would be remembered even as long as it would
take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked
therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond
recollection.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

Others sobbed and begged to be freed, calling upon some imagined force
of kindness resident in men's hearts to advance their interests.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

Ada left the porch and walked down past the barn into the pasture. The
sun was long gone below the ridgelines, the light falling fast. The
mountains stood grey in the dusk, as pale and insubstantial as breath
blown on glass. The place seemed inhabited by a great force of
loneliness. Even the old-timers talked of the weight that bears down
on a person alone in the mountains at that time of day, worse even
than full dark on a moonless night, for it is at twilight that the
threat of dark makes itself felt most strongly.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

Ruby seemed to feel the approach of winter as urgently as a bear in
autumn, eating all night and half the day to pack on the fat necessary
to feed it through hibernation. All Ruby's talk was of exertion. The
work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them
through the winter. To Ada, Ruby's monologues seemed composed mainly
of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

He thought on homeland, the big timber, the air thin and chill all the
year long. Tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind
of locomotives set on end. He thought of getting home and building him
a cabin on Cold Mountain so high that not a soul but the nighthawks
passing across the clouds in autumn could hear his sad cry. Of living
a life so quiet he would not need ears. And if Ada would go with him,
there might be the hope, so far off in the distance he did not even
really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point
so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

The mountains were just becoming visible as the morning fog burned
away. Their pale outlines stood at the horizon more like the ghosts of
mountains than the actual things.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%

Swimmer knew a few ways to kill the soul of an enemy and many ways to
protect your own. His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing,
constantly under attack and in need of strength, always threatening to
die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had
been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man
never dies.

  -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

%