He Thought That He Should Pray

Because I Drew The Ten of Swords

“It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones.“ That’s how Cormac McCarthy started The Passenger.

Nothing about me today— let’s just look at this thing. According to Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, no one has yet read this thing properly. Ok— a little about me. This book happens in New Orleans— you would think I was going to talk about that, especially after almost a year and a half of promising this subject, but no. We are only going to look at the very first page.

It had snowed lightly in the night— he hasn’t quite told us yet what we have found, but we already know. “One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her.” Yep. Sigh.¹ So there’s a dead woman— a dead woman in Wisconsin— actually, but we don’t find that out until much later. What is happening here?

Alicia Western has hung herself. She left a mental asylum, in the dead of winter, and hung herself. The indignity of death is on display— we don’t know Alicia yet, but Alicia is the most mesmerizing figure in 21st century literature. We don’t know her yet, but we are introduced to her as her final performance flubs. Her boot fell off, and so did her coat. She’s wearing a white dress.

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

“She hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees,” we are told, “with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now 
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors 
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, 
Guides us by vanities. 

But then, another character appears: A hunter. “The hunter knelt and stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him and took off his gloves and let them fall and folded his hands one upon the other.

There is roughly zero percent chance that Cormac McCarthy did not know the scene he was setting up. Hubertus is the patron saint of hunters. According to the martyrologies, Hubert was a nobleman consumed by a relentless passion for the hunt, indifferent to the sanctity of life around him. One Good Friday, while he pursued a magnificent stag deep into the forest, the creature turned to face him, revealing a glowing cross suspended between its antlers. This sudden vision of divinity—nature revealing itself as sacred—struck Hubert to the core, transforming him from a hunter into a humble pilgrim.

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

There is a difference though, a big one. Where Hubert encountered a moment of revelation and redemption, however, this hunter finds only silence and absence—an empty space where the divine is supposed to be.

He finds nothing.

The legend of St. Hubert is one of sudden, shocking transformation. He also drew the Ten of Swords. He was born in the 7th century, into a noble family who held a number of bishoprics in the Ardennes forest. Hubert’s life was defined by pursuit—of animals, of pleasure, but his story pivots on a singular, shattering moment that disrupts this dominion and opens Hubert to a cosmic scale of meaning.

One Good Friday, a holy day meant for quiet contemplation and reflection on Christ’s sacrifice, Hubert chose instead to ride into the forest, pursuing a legendary stag with a disregard for the sanctity of the day. There, deep in the wild, he encountered a creature of such magnificence and mystery that it changed him forever: the white stag. In some versions, the stag even speaks to him, calling him to repentance.

This encounter carries layered significance. The stag with the cross is both a symbol of Christ and an embodiment of nature’s sacred core, something powerful and unknowable, capable of transcending human understanding. It’s a reminder that the divine can manifest in the very things we seek to control or conquer. Hubert, standing face-to-face with this apparition, is overwhelmed not by the animal itself, but by what it reveals: his own spiritual emptiness, his failure to recognize the sacred in the world around him. In this moment, he’s not merely a hunter; he’s a man stripped of his illusions of control, brought low by the sheer weight of meaning that had been hidden in plain sight.

Hubert’s transformation is immediate and profound. He dismounts, falls to his knees, and relinquishes his bow. This surrender is crucial—it’s an act of submission to something beyond himself, a recognition of his smallness in the face of the divine. Hubert abandons his former life and becomes a pilgrim, dedicating himself to spiritual devotion. The hunter who once sought to dominate the wilderness now seeks to protect it, treating it as a sanctuary rather than a battleground.

This story frames nature as a conduit of the divine, a place where the sacred can reveal itself if approached with humility. Hubert’s former obsession with the hunt blinded him to this, but the stag forces a revelation, a confrontation with a truth he cannot deny. He learns that the wild, untamed spaces he once saw as mere landscapes for conquest are actually spaces of mystery, inhabited by forces beyond his understanding.

But again, Cormac doesn’t give us that. Our hunter mirrors Hubert’s gestures: he sets down his weapon, removes his gloves, and folds his hands in an act that resembles prayer. Yet there’s a tragic difference—where Hubert found grace, this hunter finds only desolation.

Instead of a cross-bearing stag or a radiant revelation, he faces a young girl frozen in the snow, her posture and appearance almost statuary, an icon of sorrow rather than divinity. The gestures are there, the sense of reverence and ritual, but the context has shifted. This isn’t a transformative encounter with the divine; it’s a confrontation with the emptiness left when the sacred no longer speaks. He has to supply his own prayer:

He thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time. When he opened his eyes he saw a small shape half buried in the snow and he leaned and dusted away the snow and picked up a gold chain that held a steel key, a whitegold ring.

What’s powerful about this parallel is what it reveals about the hunter’s world: a space where myth is still present, but hollowed out, emptied of meaning. He repeats the motions of Hubert, but the gestures are drained of their power. The world itself seems indifferent, the “scrupulous desolation” of the landscape offering no sign of divinity. The ritual of reverence has become a hollow act, a pageant without purpose.

Now, let’s talk about the Sibyl, too.

The Waste Land’s epigraph introduces us to the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient prophetess who, cursed with eternal life but not eternal youth, finds herself trapped in a cage, yearning only for death. In Eliot’s opening lines, she hangs like a ghost of forgotten wisdom, a figure who embodies both prophecy and despair

Now, let’s reinterpret the scene from this angle. The girl frozen in the snow is not only a white stag, but also a Sibyl. A Sibyl who has fallen silent. The hunter, instead of finding revelation in the form of a stag, finds only the remains of a vision—the dead Sibyl, the voice of a God, now extinguished in the snow. She represents a knowledge that has been cast aside, an oracle whose prophecies go unheeded. This isn’t just a failure of encounter; it’s a tragedy of understanding. The hunter, kneeling, performs the gestures of reverence, but he arrives too late—the prophecy is lost, the voice is dead.

As he looks upon her, the hunter experiences the emptiness of the Perilous Chapel. Here, the chapel isn’t an actual structure; it’s the cold, indifferent wilderness where he kneels in silence before what should be sacred. In place of revelation, he finds desolation—an echo of the Waste Land, a place where the voice of prophecy has faded to silence, and all that’s left is the empty gesture of prayer. The hunter becomes like one of Eliot’s figures, stumbling through a land devoid of meaning, in search of a truth that no longer exists.

Blake’s “Sick Rose”, that thing we talked about a few weeks ago, becomes a critical touchstone here. The girl—like the Crimson Rose—is marked by a kind of corruption, an “invisible worm” that has already taken root within her. This worm, Blake suggests, is “dark secret love,” a force of decay that has burrowed into her very being. In this reading, the hunter finds the Sibyl not as a figure of wisdom but as a broken vessel, corrupted from within by forces beyond her control. She lies in a “bed of crimson joy,” a place of both passion and destruction, her life gnawed away by something hidden, unspoken.

The Sibyl’s silence, like the silence of the Crimson Rose, suggests that whatever prophecy she once carried has been devoured by time and circumstance. She becomes a symbol of lost potential, of knowledge that could not survive the harsh realities of the world around her. In the same way, Blake’s rose is trapped in a liminal space between life and death, held in stasis by forces it cannot control. The hunter, therefore, is kneeling not only before a dead girl but before a failed prophecy, a vision of purity that could not withstand the weight of experience.

Drawing on the Perilous Chapel imagery, we can also see this snow-covered grove as a threshold space—a place where the sacred and profane collide. In Arthurian legend, the Perilous Chapel represents a site of trial and mystery, a place haunted by death and filled with ominous signs. The hunter, like a knight encountering this space, enters with an expectation of revelation, only to find himself confronted with desolation and silence.

Eliot’s own evocation of the chapel in The Waste Land underscores this emptiness:

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.

This “empty chapel” resonates with the desolate landscape surrounding the hunter. He’s alone, kneeling before a girl whose presence should evoke awe or mystery but instead brings only silence and absence. The girl—much like the chapel itself—has been hollowed out, left as a shell of what she might once have been. The wind’s echo fills the air, and all the hunter finds is the faint memory of something lost, a prophecy reduced to bones and dust.

In this reading, the hunter’s role becomes that of a witness, not to revelation but to the profound absence left when revelation fails. He is not Hubert encountering divinity in nature but a man lost in the wilderness of the Waste Land, encountering only the silence of the dead Sibyl and the empty promise of knowledge that can no longer save.

That is one page of The Passenger. I have called it the best book written so far this century— one of my bolder claims. Can you see it how I see it now? The temporal shifts in the book make it hard to guess, but my suspiscion is the “hunter,” is actually her brother-lover, Bobby Western, who is nominally the main character of the rest of the story. He’s unaccounted for at this moment throughout both of the books that feature him. But I think that is what happened. He went into the Perilous Chapel, and found nothing, and he’s now damned.

Time grows short, the list of things we need to talk about grows short as well. The list of things we’d have liked to do grows longer.

The snow blowing out there in the forest in the dark. He looked up into those cold enameled eyes glinting blue in the weak winter light. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she’d be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.

1. I still cry when it starts.