Before reading Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain ...

Before reading Charles Frazier's 1997 novel Cold Mountain, literature was something I had come to have affinity for but still saw as something foreign, exotic. My senior year of high school, my English teacher had told me that he thought I had a mind that would enjoy, as he put it, "literature," which I understood to be very different from the Tom Clancy books I had read as a child (I was precocious in that regard, and thanks in no small part to Clancy's influence I still curse far more often than most) or the history books and fantasy novels that had sustained me throughout high school. Proud of his belief that I was capable of appreciating "literature," I checked Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls out from the library because I recognized the title from one of the pieces we'd read in that English class, and found that the teacher was right. I loved the fact that the novel ended with the protagonist completing his mission - bombing a fascist-held bridge in Civil War Spain - but losing his life and the love he'd found during his mission in the process. It was an ugly ending, where victories can cost as much if not more than defeats, and, unlike the Clancy books I'd been raised on, it was an ending I understood on an instinctual level coming from where I did. 

But, while I could understand and relate to the novel on the universal level that literature is supposed to resonate, there was still that separation, a gulf between the lives of the people I knew and the people of literature. As with almost everything in America, this had a value judgment attached. We may have had the same emotions, but our stories were too proletarian to be the stuff of literature, too provincial to hold the interest of anyone who didn't happen to live in Lenoir, my small Appalachian foothills town known for making furniture and, at that time, crime and pollution. We were lesser people from a lesser place that those written about in literature, a fact I simply accepted just as I had always accepted that me and my people were naturally members of the faceless masses that populate nonplaces. That is until I encountered Cold Mountain, assigned that summer of 1998 to the incoming freshman class at Appalachian State University. 

I remember feeling a slight sense of shock when the novel opened in Raleigh then proceeded westward through a piedmont I vaguely knew. But the real revelation came one day while I was reading on Sanford Mall and came across the passage of the Goat Lady. A few pages before the novel made mention of a "Happy Valley," and it described a Happy Valley that I knew fairly well. But there were many Happy Valleys in the world. Then:

The sun broke through a slot in the clouds, and a great band of Jacob's ladder suddenly hung in the air like a gauze curtain between Inman and the blue mountain. On its north flank was a figuration of rocks, the profile of an immense bearded man reclining across the horizon. 

-- Has that mountain got a name? he said.

-- Tanawha, the woman said. The Indians called it that.

Inman looked at the big grandfather mountain and then he looked beyond it to the lesser mountains as they faded off into the southwest horizon, bathed in faint smoky haze. Waves of mountains. For all the evidence the eye told, they were endless. The grey overlapping humps of the farthest peaks distinguished themselves only as slightly darker values of the pale grey air. The shapes and their ghostly appearance spoke to Inman in a way he could not clearly interpret.

I knew the exact spot where they were, the exact ridgeline that held that vantage. I knew it because of the dozens if not hundreds of times I had beheld that same view. Then, below, the novel confirmed my belief as the Goat Lady names the silhouettes of  the low profile of Grandfather, the slanted flattop of Table Rock, Hawksbill's canid sharpness, the low profile of Grandfather reclining as the eyes moved rightward, and all the ripples leading up to them and the waves fading beyond. I knew it because my family had called that area home for two hundred years, then I realized that Inman would've passed near to my ancestors, themselves living along that ridge at the exact time of his passing through ... 

To this day, I remember the shapes of the clouds as they hovered over the rounded hilltops that lay behind the West Campus dorms. I still see the leaves in their sharp relief against the blue, feel how the sun's warmth was cut by the first undercurrents of fall's cool. Even now, I hear the sound of the wind coming from the west like the long, single crashing of a wave on a far distant ocean. I remember it all because, in a way, it was the first time I had truly noticed them as something more than simply the background. In that moment, literature -- which I had always held as above my station, something that I could appreciate but never be a part of -- validated my surroundings, and, through extension, it validated me. If people like the ones I knew in the nowhere I lived were the stuff of literature, then the barriers between high culture and low were proven to be false, paper walls. It was one of those rare moments in life when one's world suddenly grows exponentially, with possibilities manifesting and multiplying faster than they could be counted, and I don't know where I would now be, who I would now be, had that moment not occurred. 

I'm curious to know if anyone else ever had such a world-expansion (reorientation?) through an encounter with a piece of literature, prose or verse ... I'm always fascinated by the ways art intersects and informs our lives, acting as Baldwin's "light ... in all this darkness."