Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

A child’s riddle, a philosopher’s headache: Stevenson turns something as ordinary as a shadow into a miniature drama about the self. The “little shadow” is comic at first, an unwanted tagalong “that goes in and out with me,” like a sibling you can’t shake. Then comes the pivot: “what can be the use of him.” The question is pointedly practical, almost bourgeois. If it doesn’t serve a purpose, why is it there? That’s the joke, and the sting. A shadow is the perfect symbol for the parts of us that are inseparable yet hard to justify: instincts, moods, unconscious fears, even the private self that trails behind the public one.

Stevenson wrote “My Shadow” for A Child’s Garden of Verses, a book that famously refuses to patronize children. The poem’s voice is young, but the unease is adult. Notice how the shadow is gendered “him,” making it less a phenomenon than a companion - or a rival. It “goes in and out,” suggesting a threshold life: indoors/outdoors, safety/risk, daylight/darkness. The child can’t control it, can’t bargain with it, can only observe its strange loyalty.

In late-Victorian Britain, shadows carried extra freight: the era’s fascination with doubles and divided selves (think Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson’s own later hit) and a moral culture obsessed with what follows you when no one is looking. Stevenson’s intent isn’t to sermonize; it’s to stage the first encounter with that haunting fact: you are never just one thing, even when you’re alone.