LETTERS: `COLD MOUNTAIN' MAKES IMPRESSION

To the editor:

Retired folks must often find an answer to the query, "What, if anything of significance, are you doing now that you have retired?" I have sometimes turned the question back to the interrogator, substituting for "have retired" the phrase "are still working." In the last year I have had time and energy to read many things that I could not have read while I was still teaching, but rarely do I read a popular modern novel. Prodded by a review which appeared in the Missourian, I read "Cold Mountain," a first novel by North Carolinian Charles Frazier. Rather content with my present psyche, I hesitate to read anything called "life changing," but "Cold Mountain" is likely to be a major event in the life of any reader.

Students sometimes hear Homer's "Odyssey" described "as the world's first novel, and the best." "Cold Mountain" is not the first novel to be modeled somewhat upon Homer's pattern, but it examines American history in epic fashion.

Graham Greene notes that he has never read since the age of 15 a book that left a permanent impression. "Cold Mountain" sloughed off some years for me. I felt I was living in the Civil War and was witness to the incredible suffering and danger. After finishing and still blinking my tired eyes, I went to a giant supermarket to get supplies for our holiday meal, and, surrounded by other shoppers in beach regalia buying chips made from mashed potatoes and ground turkey which tasted like pork sausage, I restrained myself from turning on the crowd and asking, "Have you any idea how our forbears were starving and dying a scant 150 years ago? Do you know that your great-grandfather had the scours for three days after eating the rotten carcass of a drowned bear?" And no Pepto Bismol.

I sometimes have on the fringes of my imagination an apocalyptic daytime drama in which the electricity is off forever and there is no gasoline and the bridges are gone and I must walk the 250 miles to central Missouri to find my brothers and the cemetery where my parents are buried, only to have a brother shoot me in the face because he believes I have turned traitor and lived in the South and eaten okra. The Civil War often turned the kindest of friends into horrible enemies.

But there are cheerful matters. The verse, "Hath not God made one blood of all nations," means more. And I am going to get a CD of country fiddle music. I admire the structure of the book as I admire a well-turned vase, so compelling that after the first three pages I could not rest until I had finished -- and cannot rest yet, for that matter. I realize the horrors which come from anarchy and self-appointed militiamen, when "every man does what is right in his own eyes." But the greatest creation of the book must be the immortal characters. In this world gone made, the women hold things together. Ada is the cultured lady who gives up Charleston and the novels of George Eliot, but beyond her is the incredible Ruby, unschooled and brilliant woodscolt who majored in survival skills in her private university and draws society around her to show them it is all worthwhile.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau