6 - Defying Gravity (1852–1854)

Summary

A ball will bounce, but less and less. It's not

A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.

Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls

So in our hearts from brilliance,

Settles and is forgot.

It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

To shake our gravity up. …

Richard Wilbur, “Juggler”

With hindsight, it seems inevitable that Thoreau should have returned to Walden. It was not quite so inevitable to him, even in September 1851 when he cast about for a project suited to his impulse for “force-ful expression” (PJ 4, 51). By mid-January 1852 he did return to his manuscript (Sh 31), visiting the pond several times later that month and recording details he would use in his expansion of “The Ponds” in draft D (1852). And on January 22, in Medford, Massachusetts, he presented a lecture entitled “Life in the Woods at Walden” – “as refreshing a piece as the Lyceum will get from any lecturer going at present in New England,” remarked a sympathetic Alcott, who apparently read or heard the lecture beforehand (Log 177). That same day Thoreau himself reflected on his Walden experience in a quite different spirit: “But Why I changed–? Why I left the woods. I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back” (PJ 4, 275).