"ashes of roses"

At their picnic in the apple orchard, "as they sat on the blanket, drowsy and full from lunch, Ada told Ruby that she envied her knowledge of how the world runs" and asks her how "do you come to know such things?"  Ruby answers that a "lot of it was grandmother knowledge, got from wandering around the settlement talking to any old woman who would talk back, watching them work and asking questions." She sums up by saying it "was mostly a matter of being attentive."

The contrast between two different views of the world --- the practical and the imaginative, the materialistic and the idealistic --- go back at least as far as Aristotle and Plato. And there are infinite variations on the contrast, some comic, some tragic --- and some, surprisingly enough, a combination of the two. I'm thinking now of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  Ada and Ruby are a lot like female versions of those two.  Don Quixote is too full of poetry and "high" moral ideals to be "attentive" to the ordinary world in front of him, and Sancho, who initially grumbles about Quixote's "foolish ideas" and often dangerous illusions (all acquired from his excessive reading of Arthurian romances) soon becomes caught up in and eventually even "needs" the poetic world Don Quixote tries to live in.

So it's all a matter of perception, and that can get very complicated, philosophically speaking.  By way of illustration, consider Ada's memory of the Charleston party that took place shortly before the war and the dress she wore that night.  It was "a dress of mauve silk, trimmed in lace dyed to match."  Monroe, her preacher, Emersonian romantic father, "had bought the entire bolt of cloth from which the dress was made so that no one else might wear that color."

She goes "out on the river" with a young man named Blount who talks to her about the coming war with the usual bravado but then breaks down and admits he is afraid. Ada can't make herself say the "proper thing . . . that duty and honor demanded brave action in defense of homeland" [there we have problems with language again], so she says "nothing and only continued to stroke the back of his hand" hoping he won't misunderstand her gesture.

They return to the party, and the following occurs:

. . . as she had walked through the house to go upstairs to her room, she had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in the mirror. She stopped and looked.  The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy for the woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture. 

Then Ada took a step forward, and the other women did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. 

Talk about "subjectivity," how frequently and easily we are confused (even deceived) by appearances!  Ada doesn't even recognize herself in the mirror! It's not until she reclaims her identity (as the center of her world) that she correctly identifies the figure in the mirror and the "correct" color of her dress.  From mauve to ashes of roses -- a darkening of her perceptions.

Ruby, of course, being practical, dismisses the tale and "was not much impressed with Blount's efforts toward honor and could only marvel at lives so useless that they required missing sleep and paddling about on a river for pleasure."  Sancho Panza couldn't have said it better.

Ada continues her philosophical mediation on perception, more specifically the contrast between the mountains and Charleston.

This mountain country was so dark and inclined to the vertical compared with Charleston. Monroe had commented that, like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which he ought to aim all our yearning.

But Ada is thinking more on her own now.

. . . she held the opinion that what she saw was no token but was all the life there is. It was a position in most ways contrary to Monroe's; nevertheless, it did not rule out its own denomination of sharp yearning, though Ada could not entirely set a name to its direction. 

When Ruby leaves to do "night work" (her term for sleep) and Ada goes out to bring in the cows, a great loneliness comes over her.  She remembers what her father had said, though she no longer completely takes his "word" for "truth."

. . . as with most things, Monroe had an explanation. He said that in their hearts people feel that long ago God was everywhere all the time; the sense of loneliness is what fills the vacuum when He pulls back one degree more remote.

There is a movie title, Places in the Heart, that suggests the connection between a person's emotional core and "place," where they are in the world, objectively and subjectively.  Cold Mountain is "home" for both Ada and Inman -- but in many ways they are both still struggling to reach their true "home" as were Odysseus and Penelope in the selections from Homer that Ada reads to Ruby.  Being practical, of course, "Ruby had grown impatient with Penelope, but she would sit for a long evening and laugh and laugh at the tribulations of Odysseus, all the stones the gods threw in his passway."

There is the long journey to get back "home." (Odysseus/Inman)  And the equally difficult struggle to make a particular place "home," to preserve it. (Penelope/Ada)