"a satisfied mind"

From the ritual slaughters of the previous chapter and its songs "burdened with themes of death and solitude" we come back to Ada and Ruby as they spend "much of the autumn working with apples" and listen to Stobrod play his fiddle, accompanied by a retarded man with an intuitive skill for playing the banjo.

Stobrod uses his fiddle tunes as "a sort of autobiography of his war years." Here's Ada's reaction, which reflects a change in attitude toward life and art.

Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed, than at any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. Ada wished there was a way to capture what she was hearing in the way of an ambrotype captures images, so it could be held in reserve for the benefit of a future whose residents might again need access to what it stood for. 

This is indirectly a statement of Frazier's approach to his novel.  Being a first novel it is naturally "coarse" and rough, but his "faith" in the "substance" of his story overcomes that. Frazier's novel is a form of "folk art," gathering together Appalachian and family stories in a quilt-work narrative.

Early in the chapter, Ada starts a letter to a friend in Charleston, which begins, "you would not know me; nor, upon seeing the current want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to."  Ada goes on to explain how living in the mountains has changed her:

Working in the fields, there are brief times when I go totally without thought. Not one idea crosses my mind, though my senses are alert to all around me. Should a crow fly over, I mark it in all its details, but I do not seek analogy for its blackness. It know it is a type of nothing, not metaphoric. A thing unto itself without comparison. I believe those moments to be the root of my new mien. You would not know it on me for I suspect it is somehow akin to contentment. 

Despite the casual-seeming form of  a personal letter (both Ada and Inman have tried, unsuccessfully, to write letters to each other), this is a sophisticated meditation on the distinction between language and the "real" world that "words" attempt to represent.  The example of a "crow" is not a coincidence (is anything in "art" a coincidence?), not pure description.  In the debate between "description" and "analogy" as the heart of writing, Ada declares herself in the camp of those who trust to description.  This provides Frazier with his theoretical basis for the richness and craftsman-like detail of his descriptions.

Ada has been trying to read Adam Bede (by a Victorian woman writer of some note -- George Eliot), but it does not go well.  She gets even more abstract and "literary" in her thoughts:

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. 

Looking at the sun setting over the mountains, she states to herself one of the primary "life-lessons" Nature provides:

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?

"Where am I" is a variation on "who am I?" or what meaning am I supposed to derive from my life.  And the answer is: you are living in a place called "Cold Mountain," and your identity is defined by what you do in that place, the place that is yourself.

This might be the time to quote the full poem by the Chinese poet, Han-shan or "Cold Mountain"

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here. 

To paraphrase: Ada's heart is not the same as Inman's.  No two people's hearts ever are.  The question we are reminded to ask as the novel gets toward the end of its "path" is: With such different hearts, will Ada and Inman make it?

Outside now, steady rain falls on the thick-leaved tulip trees close to the balcony at the back of my third-story apartment. I can see the rain, the trees, and the rough wooden balcony as I turn my eyes from what I'm writing. The day is heavy and overcast.  Inside, on the other side of the window, I am writing in the light of two halogen lamps and a computer screen. I am silent, but my mind is full of thoughts, only few of which make to the screen.

So what does the scene I've just described mean?  What would the mind make of it?  Do we need to make it "represent" something else, something inside us?  Or is the description enough?