I didn't like the movie Cold Mountain, but when I found this passage from the book in my inbox the other day, I liked it. It seemed awfully relevant for our times. I've been meaning to post it for a while.




Private Inman and his companion, an unnamed boy-soldier from Tennessee, are sitting out the night in a frozen Civil War battlefield “littered with bodies, and churned up by artillery.” It is long past midnight, and the eeriness of the carnage is still keeping them from sleep. Suddenly Inman spies Orion and, finding comfort in its familiar shape, is able to relax. The constellation stands there on the eastern horizon “like a sign in the sky…sure of himself as a man can be.” Pointing it out, Inman tells his comrade that the name of Orion’s brightest star is Rigel:

The boy peered up and said, How do you know its name?
- I read it in a book, Inman said.
- Then that’s just a name we give it, the boy said. It ain’t God’s name.

Inman had thought on the issue a minute and then said, How would you ever come to know God’s name for that star?
- You wouldn’t, He holds it close, the boy said. It’s a thing you’ll never know. It’s a lesson that sometimes we’re meant to settle for ignorance. Right there’s what mostly comes of knowledge, the boy said, tipping his chin out at the broken land…

At the time, Inman had thought the boy a fool and had remained content to know our name for Orion’s principal star and to let God keep His a dark secret. But he now wondered if the boy might have had a point about knowledge, or at least some varieties of it.