Cold Mountain
I am in the position of the man who was asked if he’d seen "The Passion of The Christ."
No, he’d replied, but I’ve read the Book.
I suppose the movie made of Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain may be wonderful, but I suspect I’ll never know. It is hard to believe that cinematography can catch the evocative delicacy of his descriptions of the natural setting of the novel.
I think, too, that I’ve read no better description of the redemptive power of music…not the listening to it, but the making of it.
Reading the dog-eared, floppy-covered paper-back edition delighted in its own right, but there was the added pleasure of discovering, too, the pleasure of other readers.
The book had been given me by a friend, who dug it out of a used book bin at his local library. He insisted I take it with me to have something to read on my ride home. When I started to read it I found that it had been read and annotated by at least two others…one who left small strips of post-it markers on prized passages, and another who marked with yellow hi-liter.
They pointed me to pleasures I might otherwise have missed and I felt part of a community of readers. Odd, isn't it?
