The Shadow

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

The world is full of complexity and nuance, but sometimes you need the moral clarity of a children’s book. Of course you need to read The Federalist Papers, but save some time for The Once and Future King, Watership Down, and The Wind in the Willows.

 

I need reminders in my life. I keep a file folder with some embarrassing documents in it—worthless stock-option paperwork, an arrest report, some unpleasant legal paperwork—and that folder is labeled: “You Are Not Smart.” For a long time, I had a reminder on my phone that popped up every evening at 9 p.m.: “Don’t be Toad.” If you have read The Wind in the Willows, you know.

 

There are all sorts of great stuff in The Wind in the Willows, and, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the story and the prose get more demanding as the book progresses. In a latter chapter, our friends Mole and Rat take on the serious task of looking for Otter’s lost son, Portly, who has gone missing. It is not the first time the little otter has wandered off, but his father is worried. The horrible specter of a child drowning falls over the bucolic scene.

 

“[T]his time it’s more serious,” said the Rat gravely. “He’s been missing for some days now, and the Otters have hunted everywhere, high and low, without finding the slightest trace. And they’ve asked every animal, too, for miles around, and no one knows anything about him. Otter’s evidently more anxious than he’ll admit. I got out of him that young Portly hasn’t learnt to swim very well yet, and I can see he’s thinking of the weir. There’s a lot of water coming down still, considering the time of the year, and the place always had a fascination for the child. And then there are—well, traps and things—you know. Otter’s not the fellow to be nervous about any son of his before it’s time. And now he is nervous. When I left, he came out with me—said he wanted some air, and talked about stretching his legs. But I could see it wasn’t that, so I drew him out and pumped him, and got it all from him at last. He was going to spend the night watching by the ford. You know the place where the old ford used to be, in by-gone days before they built the bridge?”

 

“I know it well,” said the Mole. “But why should Otter choose to watch there?”

 

“Well, it seems that it was there he gave Portly his first swimming-lesson,” continued the Rat. “From that shallow, gravelly spit near the bank. And it was there he used to teach him fishing, and there young Portly caught his first fish, of which he was so very proud. The child loved the spot, and Otter thinks that if he came wandering back from wherever he is—if he is anywhere by this time, poor little chap—he might make for the ford he was so fond of; or if he came across it he’d remember it well, and stop there and play, perhaps. So Otter goes there every night and watches—on the chance, you know, just on the chance!”

 

They were silent for a time, both thinking of the same thing—the lonely, heart-sore animal, crouched by the ford, watching and waiting, the long night through—on the chance.

 

If you want to terrify a father of four little boys, just returned from a trip to the lake, there is your passage.

 

Rat and Mole go looking for little Portly, and, happily, they find him. But they also find someone else: God—at least, God as He reveals Himself to innocent little animals.

 

[S]uddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

 

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

 

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

 

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love.

 

“Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

 

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

 

Young Portly half-remembers the Friend and Helper, at least for a few minutes, and weeps inconsolably at the absence of that holy presence. Rat manages for the briefest moment to hold on to the quickly vanishing memory of what he has seen: “Some—great—animal—has been here,” he says. He later catches a snippet of a song on the wind:

 

Lest the awe should dwell

 

And turn your frolic to fret

 

You shall look on my power at the helping hour

 

But then you shall forget!

 

The Helper’s final act of charity is to be forgotten, to give the animals the grace of their innocence. The scene is, in my opinion, one of the finest passages in all of English literature.

 

I would not put Katrina Charman’s The Last Firehawk series in quite such a rarefied category, but I love those books nonetheless if only because my 4-year-old son loves them. It is bog-standard children’s fantasy literature stuff: A small owl named Tag dreams of joining the knightly ranks of the Owls of Valor, but he is told that he is too small to be a great warrior. Spoiler alert: He becomes an Owl of Valor, as indeed does his slingshot-toting squirrel sidekick, Skyla, who more than makes up in valor what she lacks in owl-ness. The villain in the first half of the series is a wicked old vulture called Thorn, who wields a terrible instrument of black magic called the Shadow, which darkens the skies, suffocates the trees and flowers, and drains the woods of their magic. Pretty straightforward stuff, but after Thorn is exiled, we are introduced to his twin brother, Claw, who walks with a limp and who is not evil like his brother but seeks the friends’ help (the heroes are almost always described as “the friends,” and that is not careless repetition) in returning home from the magical realm to which he has been exiled. Adult readers will immediately understand that Claw is, in fact, Thorn in disguise, and that his appeal to the friends for help is a ruse deployed to infiltrate the group for his own wicked purposes. But the author takes the story in an interesting direction from there: Thorn does betray the friends but, having pretended to be a friend, he has discovered what it is like to have friends and to be a friend, which ultimately leads him to repent of his wicked ways and join the good guys for real—to stop pretending to be Claw and simply become that which he had been pretending to be. “The Shadow was your only friend,” Tag says. Thorn’s answer isn’t Shakespeare, but it is a line worth remembering: “The Shadow was always there for me.”

 

Like the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings, the Shadow is not only a weapon—it has a will of its own. Different villains may seem to wield the Shadow, but the Shadow wields them: It is the master, not the servant. The Shadow attaches itself to those who have been hurt, to the friendless, to those who feel they have been mistreated and hard done by—because they have been mistreated and hard done by—and it promises them the means to redress their grievances and to relieve their suffering. Charman is particularly intelligent to give the story’s villains legitimate complaints and real suffering. Some villains are simply born that way—“Nothing happened to me—I happened!” Hannibal Lecter insists—but some villains are made.

 

Since I am consulting Donald Trump’s favorite psychiatrist here already, consider Dr. Lecter’s diagnosis of “Buffalo Bill,” the sexually traumatized serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs. “Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.” I cannot help here but think of J.D. Vance, who has tried on a series of political skin-suits: He hates his own identity, and he thinks that makes him …  whatever it is J.D. Vance thinks he is. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.

 

“The Shadow was always there for me.”

 

In Oliver Stone’s Nixon—the single best film ever made about American politics, as long as you do not take it to be a history of the Nixon administration any more than Macbeth is a history of 11^th-century Scotland—Ed Harris offers a magnificent and terrifying turn as Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt, who explains the facts of life to White House counsel John Dean:

 

John, sooner or later, sooner, I think, you’re gonna learn a lesson that's been learned by everyone who's ever gotten close to Richard Nixon. That he’s the darkness reaching out for the darkness. And eventually, it’s either you or him. Your grave’s already been dug, John.

 

First of all: If I ever find the time to put my awesome McSwain guitar to its proper use and start a doom-metal band, I’m definitely going to call it The Darkness Reaching Out for the Darkness. That is a great bit of writing. (The screenplay was a joint work of Stone and the screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson.) And it does not take very much imagination to see Oliver Stone’s Nixon—or the real Richard M. Nixon—as another version of Thorn: hardened by privation, excluded, condescended to, lonely—and angry. The Shadow had always been there for him.

 

Winston Churchill used the Victorian euphemism “black dog” to refer to what probably would be diagnosed as depression in our time. It is a clever expression in that depression has a kind of almost literal presence, physical or almost physical, at least for some people for whom it becomes a kind of character in the story of their lives. Churchill’s “black dog” was David Foster Wallace’s “great shark of pain,” the predator that ultimately killed him. For one of his characters, depression was just … It. Wallace’s frank description of depression in Infinite Jest is unsurpassed, at least in my reading:

 

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency—sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying—are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.

 

We think of depression as a kind of sadness, but sadness is only one possible symptom of the underlying condition, which may instead manifest as irritability or anger. One must be careful about medicalizing this stuff, of course: Some people have legitimate mental health problems that require treatment, some people are just putzes, and some people are putzes with legitimate mental health problems. Given that psychotherapy (as distinct from psychiatry) remains profoundly influenced by the fraudulent work of Sigmund Freud in spite of the field’s efforts to reform itself, it is easy to think of it as a species of pure quackery along the lines of astrology. I try to take a pragmatic view of it: There is essentially no scientific basis for chiropractic therapy, which is rooted in 19^th-century pseudoscience, but some people swear by it, and, if it works for them, I am happy for them. If the emotional version of a backrub or a brisk walk through the park is what gets you through the day and keeps you off the ledge that Wallace wrote about—

 

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. … When the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

 

—then I am all for the emotional version of a backrub.

 

But don’t kid yourselves, either: These are all analgesics, as are any number of pleasant or unpleasant addictions, social media and cable news primal-scream therapy sessions, and a whole lot of other things pretending to be something else. This is the Shadow’s world.

 

The first word I hear every morning is “Papa!” and it is my job to keep the Shadow at bay for as long as I am able, to not fail those four little boys, which is my “terror way worse than falling.” (One of those terrors, anyway. I have a list.) And as much as I may identify with the frivolous and self-regarding Toad while wishing I were more like Mole or Rat or even the reformed Claw, I have to read further into the book to find the truth. However much we would like to be chivalrous Owls of Valor with swords and gleaming armor, that is not who we are—not now, not in the final analysis, not when it really matters. Take a good look in the mirror and what you will see looking back is the one who is—Dante knew!—lost in the dark wood, who would call out to the Friend and Helper if only we had the conviction, if only we knew how.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

I do not find very many silver linings in the dark clouds, and I do not spend much time looking for them. It would be obscene to be grateful for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been a ghastly festival of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, thievery, and more. But it is teaching us something: Scarcity is still a reality.

 

“Scarcity is a choice,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson insisted in Abundance, a sentence that is not only wrong and stupid but willfully stupid. Klein may call to mind one of my father’s unlovely expressions—“I’d like to buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth”—but he is not stupid enough to believe what he wrote.

 

Scarcity, as we are once again learning the hard way, is a real thing. There are only so many missile interceptors in the arsenal, and if you want to invest time, labor, and capital in building new ones—let us not pretend this is just a matter of shifting around meaningless digital fiat dollars—then that time, labor, and capital cannot be used for other things. Dwight Eisenhower, who was not an economist, was a better economist than anybody advising the White House right now:

 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

 

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

 

Donald Trump likes to sneer at people reduced to “begging, like a dog.” Happily, he has sycophantic factotum J.D. Vance to do his begging for him. The Ukrainians have been targeting oil tankers at an important Russian port with drones in order to choke off the money that Moscow uses to buy missiles to fire at Ukrainian maternity wards and apartment buildings, and given the choice between seeing Ukrainian women and children massacred by Russians and paying uncomfortably high prices for gasoline, Americans will happily see dead Ukrainian women and children stacked up like firewood. From the Telegraph:

 

In a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the US vice-president warned that the attacks at Novorossiysk were disrupting oil markets and threatening American business interests in the region.

 

Ukraine had been hitting tankers carrying Kazakh crude to a terminal operated by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).

 

Chevron and ExxonMobil, two of the biggest US energy companies, hold stakes in the CPC and in the western Kazakh oilfields that supply it, with Chevron possessing some 50 per cent of Tengiz, Kazakhstan's largest field, and Exxon 25 per cent.

 

Since the phone call on July 31, there have been no further strikes on tankers near the CPC terminal.

 

Kyiv stepped up strikes on shipping and energy infrastructure last month in an effort to choke off the revenue funding Moscow’s war machine. Its efforts knocked out as much as one fifth of CPC oil loadings in July.

 

I suppose that I am friendlier to the oil majors than the average American journalist is. I like the oil business. Our country is lucky to have the energy industry it does. (As Don Draper says, there is no need to thank them–that’s what the money’s for.) But running a global oil company puts you in business with some rotten people and rotten regimes. If you go to bed with the devil, you can’t complain if you wake up with an acute burning sensation. It is the nature of the business. I wish the Ukrainians would set fire to every tanker plying its trade at Novorossiysk. Chevron is going to be fine.

 

Oil is a fungible commodity. There is really no such thing as “Russian oil.” There is just oil. And if Ukraine takes some off the market, then that affects energy prices worldwide. The United States is blessed with abundant energy resources and has developed—often in the teeth of political opposition—an enormously sophisticated domestic industry to make the most of it. But Ukraine’s efforts to secure its national survival have cost some American shareholders a few bucks, and high gasoline prices are an inconvenience to Republicans facing a restive midterm electorate. And while Ukraine targets Russian oil processors, the Russians are targeting Ukrainian grain—and, thus, the worldwide food supply.

 

War is not cheap. But war is not the worst outcome. It may be the second-worst outcome, but the Ukrainians know what the worst outcome is.