Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

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Jonathan was dazzled. He forgot to ask about heaven. “How do you do that? What does it feel like? How far can you go?'

“You can go to any place and to any time that you wish to go,' the Elder said. “I've gone everywhere and everywhen I can think of.' He looked across the sea. “It's strange. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn't a place or a time, because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is . . .'

“Can you teach me to fly like that?' Jonathan Seagull trembled to conquer another unknown.

'Of course, if you wish to learn.'

“I wish. When can we start?'

'We could start now, if you'd like.'

“I want to learn to fly like that,' Jonathan said, and a strange light glowed in his eyes. “Tell me what to do.'

Chiang spoke slowly and watched the younger gull ever so carefully. “To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,' he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived . .

The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing himself as trapped inside a limited body that had a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.
 
Jonathan kept at it, fiercely, day after day, from before sunrise till past midnight. And for all his effort he moved not a feather-width from his spot.

'Forget about faith!' Chiang said it time and again. 'You didn't need faith to fly, you needed to understand flying. This is just the same. Now try again . .

Then one day Jonathan, standing on the shore, closing his eyes, concentrating, all in a flash knew what Chiang had been telling him. 'Why, that's true! I am a perfect, unlimited gull!' He felt a great shock of joy.

'Good!' said Chiang, and there was victory in his voice.

Jonathan opened his eyes. He stood alone with the Elder on a totally different seashore—trees down to the water's edge, twin yellow suns turning overhead.

'At last you've got the idea,' Chiang said, 'but your control needs a little work . . .'

Jonathan was stunned. 'Where are we?'

Utterly unimpressed with the strange surroundings, the Elder brushed the question aside. 'We're on some planet, obviously, with a green sky and a double star for a sun.'

Jonathan made a scree of delight, the first sound he had made since he had left Earth. 'IT WORKS!'

'Well, of course it works, Jon,' said Chiang. 'It always works, when you know what you're doing. Now about your control . .
 
By the time they returned, it was dark. The other gulls looked at Jonathan with awe in their golden eyes, for they had seen him disappear from where he had been rooted for so long.

He stood their congratulations for less than a minute. 'I'm the newcomer here! I'm just beginning! It is I who must learn from you!'

'I wonder about that, Jon,' said Sullivan, standing near. 'You have less fear of learning than any gull I've seen in ten thousand years.' The Flock fell silent, and Jonathan fidgeted in embarrassment.

'We can start working with time if you wish,' Chiang said, 'till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love.'

A month went by, or something that felt about like a month, and Jonathan learned at a tremendous rate. He always had learned quickly from ordinary experience, and now, the special student of the Elder Himself, he took in new ideas like a streamlined feathered computer.
 
But then the day came that Chiang vanished. He had been talking quietly with them all, exhorting them never to stop their learning and their practicing and their striving to understand more of the perfect invisible principle of all life. Then, as he spoke, his feathers went brighter and brighter and at last turned so brilliant that no gull could look upon him.

'Jonathan ' he said, and these were the last words that he spoke, 'keep working on love.'

When they could see again, Chiang was gone.
 
As the days went past, Jonathan found himself thinking time and again of the Earth from which he had come. If he had known there just a tenth, just a hundredth, of what he knew here, how much more life would have meant! He stood on the sand and fell to wondering if there was a gull back there who might be struggling to break out of his limits, to see the meaning of flight beyond a way of travel to get a breadcrumb from a rowboat. Perhaps there might even have been one made Outcast for speaking his truth in the face of the Flock. And the more Jonathan practiced his kindness lessons, and the more he worked to know the nature of love, the more he wanted to go back to Earth. For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.

Sullivan, adept now at thought-speed flight and helping the others to learn, was doubtful.

'Jon, you were Outcast once. Why do you think that any of the gulls in your old time would listen to you now? You know the proverb, and it's true: The gull sees farthest who flies highest. Those gulls where you came from are standing on the ground, squawking and fighting among themselves. They're a thousand miles from heaven—and you say you want to show them heaven from where they stand! Jon, they can't see their own wingtips! Stay here. Help the new gulls here, the ones who are high enough to see what you have to tell them.' He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, 'What if Chiang had gone back to his old worlds? Where would you have been today?'

The last point was the telling one, and Sullivan was right. The gull sees farthest who flies highest.

Jonathan stayed and worked with the new birds coming in, who were all very bright and quick with their lessons. But the old feeling came back, and he couldn't help but think that there might be one or two gulls back on Earth who would be able to learn, too. How much more would he have known by now if Chiang had come to him on the day that he was Outcast!
 
'Sully, I must go back,' he said at last. 'Your students are doing well. They can help you bring the newcomers along.'

Sullivan sighed, but he did not argue. 'I think I'll miss you, Jonathan,' was all he said.

'Sully, for shame!' Jonathan said in reproach, 'and don't be foolish! What are we trying to practice every day? If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?'

Sullivan Seagull laughed in spite of himself. 'You crazy bird,' he said kindly. 'If anybody can show someone on the ground how to see a thousand miles, it will be Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' He looked at the sand. 'Good-bye, Jon, my friend.'

'Good-bye, Sully. We'll meet again.' And with that, Jonathan held in thought an image of the great gull-flocks on the shore of another time, and he knew with practiced ease that he was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all.
 
Fletcher Lynd Seagull was still quite young, but already he knew that no bird had ever been so harshly treated by any Flock, or with so much injustice.

'I don't care what they say,' he thought fiercely, and his vision blurred as he flew out toward the Far Cliffs. 'There's so much more to flying than just flapping around from place to place! A . . . a . . . mosquito does that! One little barrel-roll around the Elder Gull, just for fun, and I'm Outcast! Are they blind? Can't they see? Can't they think of the glory that it'll be when we really learn to fly?

'I don't care what they think. I'll show them what flying is! I'll be pure Outlaw, if that's the way they want it. And I'll make them so sorry . . .'

The voice came inside his own head, and though it was very gentle, it startled him so much that he faltered and stumbled in the air.

'Don't be harsh on them, Fletcher Seagull. In casting you out, the other gulls have only hurt themselves, and one day they will know this, and one day they will see what you see. Forgive them, and help them to understand.'

An inch from his right wingtip flew the most brilliant white gull in all the world, gliding effortlessly along, not moving a feather, at what was very nearly Fletcher's top speed.

There was a moment of chaos in the young bird.

'What's going on? Am I mad? Am I dead? What is this?'

Low and calm, the voice went on within his thought, demanding an answer. 'Fletcher Lynd Seagull, do you want to fly?'

'YES, I WANT TO FLY!'

'Fletcher Lynd Seagull, do you want to fly so much that you will forgive the Flock, and learn, and go back to them one day and work to help them know?'

There was no lying to this magnificent skilful being, no matter how proud or how hurt a bird was Fletcher Seagull.

'I do,' he said softly.

'Then, Fletch,' that bright creature said to him, and the voice was very kind, 'Let's begin with Level Flight. . .
 
Part Three

Jonathan circled slowly over the Far Cliffs, watching. This rough young Fletcher Gull was very nearly a perfect flight-student. He was strong and light and quick in the air, but far and away more important, he had a blazing drive to learn to fly.

Here he came this minute, a blurred grey shape roaring out of a dive, flashing one hundred fifty miles per hour past his instructor. He pulled abruptly into another try at a sixteen-point vertical slow roll, calling the points out loud.

. . eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . see-Jonathan-l'm-running-out-of-airspeed . . . eleven . . . l-want-good-sharp-stops like-yours . . . twelve . . . but-blast-it-l-just-can't-make . . . thirteen . . . these-last-three-points . . . without . . . fourtee. . aaakkl'

Fletcher's whipstall at the top was all the worse for his rage and fury at failing. He fell backward, tumbled, slammed savagely into an inverted spin, and recovered at last, panting, a hundred feet below his instructor's level.

'You're wasting your time with me, Jonathan! I'm too dumb! I'm too stupid! I try and try, but I'll never get it!'

Jonathan Seagull looked down at him and nodded. 'You'll never get it for sure as long as you make that pullup so hard. Fletcher, you lost forty miles an hour in the entry! You have to be smooth! Firm but smooth, remember?'

He dropped down to the level of the younger gull. 'Let's try it together now, in formation. And pay attention to that pullup. It's a smooth, easy entry.'
 
By the end of three months Jonathan had six other students, Outcasts all, yet curious about this strange new idea of flight for the joy of flying.

Still, it was easier for them to practice high performance than it was to understand the reason behind it.

'Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom,' Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, 'and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. That's why all this high-speed practice, and low speed, and aerobatics . .

. . . and his students would be asleep, exhausted from the day's flying. They liked the practice, because it was fast and exciting and it fed a hunger for learning that grew with every lesson. But not one of them, not even Fletcher Lynd Gull, had come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as the flight of wind and feather.

'Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip,' Jonathan would say, other times, 'is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too. . . But no matter how he said it, it sounded like pleasant fiction, and they needed more to sleep.
 
It was only a month later that Jonathan said the time had come to return to the Flock.

'We're not ready!' said Henry Calvin Gull. 'We're not welcome! We're Outcast! We can't force ourselves to go where we're not welcome, can we?'

'We're free to go where we wish and to be what we are,' Jonathan answered, and he lifted from the sand and turned east, toward the home grounds of the Flock.

There was brief anguish among his students, for it is the Law of the Flock that an Outcast never returns, and the Law had not been broken once in ten thousand years. The Law said stay; Jonathan said go; and by now he was a mile across the water. If they waited much longer, he would reach a hostile Flock alone.

'Well, we don't have to obey the law if we're not a part of the Flock, do we?' Fletcher said, rather self-consciously. 'Besides, if there's a fight, we'll be a lot more help there than here.'

And so they flew in from the west that morning, eight of them in a double-diamond formation, wingtips almost overlapping. They came across the Flock's Council Beach at a hundred thirty-five miles per hour, Jonathan in the lead, Fletcher smoothly at his right wing, Henry Calvin struggling gamely at his left. Then the whole formation rolled slowly to the right, as one bird . . . level . . . to . . . inverted . . . to . . . level, the wind whipping over them all.

The squawks and grockles of everyday life in the Flock were cut off as though the formation were a giant knife, and eight thousand gull-eyes watched, without a single blink. One by one, each of the eight birds pulled sharply upward into a full loop and flew all the way around to a dead-slow stand-up landing on the sand. Then as though this sort of thing happened every day, Jonathan Seagull began his critique of the flight.

'To begin with,' he said with a wry smile, 'you were all a bit late on the join-up . .
 
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It went like lightning through the Flock. Those birds are Outcast! And they have returned! And that . . . that can't happen! Fletcher's predictions of battle melted in the Flock's confusion.

'Well, sure, O.K., they're Outcast,' said some of the younger gulls, 'but hey, man, where did they learn to fly like that?'

It took almost an hour for the Word of the Elder to pass through the Flock: Ignore them. The gull who speaks to an Outcast is himself Outcast. The gull who looks upon an Outcast breaks the Law of the Flock.

Grey-feathered backs were turned upon Jonathan from that moment onward, but he didn't appear to notice. He held his practice sessions directly over the Council Beach and for the first time began pressing his students to the limit of their ability.

'Martin Gull!' he shouted across the sky. 'You say you know low-speed flying. You know nothing till you prove it! FLY!'

So quiet little Martin William Seagull, startled to be caught under his instructor's fire, surprised himself and became a wizard of low speeds. In the lightest breeze he could curve his feathers to lift himself without a single flap of wing from sand to cloud and down again.

Likewise Charles-Roland Gull flew the Great Mountain Wind to twenty-four thousand feet, came down blue from the cold thin air, amazed and happy, determined to go still higher tomorrow.

Fletcher Seagull, who loved aerobatics like no one else, conquered his sixteen-point vertical slow roll and the next day topped it off with a triple cartwheel, his feathers flashing white sunlight to a beach from which more than one furtive eye watched.

Every hour Jonathan was there at the side of each of his students, demonstrating, suggesting, pressuring, guiding. He flew with them through night and cloud and storm, for the sport of it, while the Flock huddled miserably on the ground.
 
When the flying was done, the students relaxed on the sand, and in time they listened more closely to Jonathan. He had some crazy ideas that they couldn't understand, but then he had some good ones that they could.

Gradually, in the night, another circle formed around the circle of students—a circle of curious gulls listening in the darkness for hours on end, not wishing to see or be seen of one another, fading away before daybreak.
 
It was a month after the Return that the first gull of the Flock crossed the line and asked to learn how to fly. In his asking, Terrence Lowell Gull became a condemned bird, labelled Outcast; and the eighth of Jonathan's students.

The next night from the Flock came Kirk Maynard Gull, wobbling across the sand, dragging his left wing, to collapse at Jonathan's feet. 'Help me,' he said very quietly, speaking in the way that the dying speak. 'I want to fly more than anything else in the world . . .'

'Come along then,' said Jonathan. 'Climb with me away from the ground, and we'll begin.'

'You don't understand. My wing. I can't move my wing.'

'Maynard Gull, you have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. It is the Law of the Great Gull, the Law that Is.'

'Are you saying I can fly?'

'I say you are free.'

As simply and as quickly as that, Kirk Maynard Gull spread his wings, effortlessly, and lifted into the dark night air. The Flock was roused from sleep by his cry, as loud as he could scream it, from five hundred feet up; 'I can fly! Listen!

I CAN FLY!'
 
By sunrise there were nearly a thousand birds standing outside the circle of students, looking curiously at Maynard. They didn't care whether they were seen or not, and they listened, trying to understand Jonathan Seagull.

He spoke of very simple things—that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.

'Set aside,' came a voice from the multitude, 'even if it be the Law of the Flock?'

'The only true law is that which leads to freedom,' Jonathan said. 'There is no other.'

'How do you expect us to fly as you fly?' came another voice. 'You are special and gifted and divine, above other birds.'

'Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.'

His students, save Fletcher, shifted uneasily. They hadn't realized that this was what they were doing.

The crowd grew larger every day, coming to question, to idolize, to scorn.

'They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself,' Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, 'then you are a thousand years ahead of your time.'

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. 'What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?'

A long silence. 'Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it; that s got nothing to do with time. We're ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.'

'That's something,' Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. 'That's not half as bad as being ahead of our time.'
 
It happened just a week later Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high-speed flying to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of his dive from seven thousand feet, a long gray streak firing a few inches above the beach, when a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.

It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting; afraid and sad and sorry, terribly sorry.

The voice came to him as it had in the first day that he had met Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

'The trick, Fletcher, is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently. We don't tackle flying through rock until a little later in the program.'

'Jonathan!'

'Also known as the Son of the Great Gull,' his instructor said dryly.

'What are you doing here? The cliff! Haven't I . . . didn't I . . . die?'

'Oh, Fletch, come on. Think. If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn't die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly. It's your choice now. You can stay here and learn on this level—which is quite a bit higher than the one you left, by the way—or you can go back and keep working with the Flock. The Elders were hoping for some kind of disaster, but they're startled that you obliged them so well.'

'I want to go back to the Flock, of course. I've barely begun with the new group!'

'Very well, Fletcher. Remember what we were saying about one's body being nothing more than thought itself. . . .?'
 
Fletcher shook his head and stretched his wings and opened his eyes at the base of the cliff, in the centre of the whole Flock assembled. There was a great clamour of squawks and screes from the crowd when first he moved.

'He lives! He that was dead lives!'

'Touched him with a wingtip! Brought him to life! The Son of the Great Gull!'

'No! He denies it! He's a devil! DEVIL! Come to break the Flock!'

There were four thousand gulls in the crowd, frightened at what had happened, and the cry DEVIL! went through them like the wind of an ocean storm. Eyes glazed, beaks sharp, they closed in to destroy.

'Would you feel better if we left, Fletcher?' asked Jonathan.

'I certainly wouldn't object too much if we did . .

Instantly they stood together a half-mile away, and the flashing beaks of the mob closed on empty air.

'Why is it,' Jonathan puzzled, 'that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he'd just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?'

Fletcher still blinked from the change of scene. 'What did you just do? How did we get here?'

'You did say you wanted to be out of the mob, didn't

you?'

'Yes! But how did you . .

'Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.'
 
By morning the Flock had forgotten its insanity, but Fletcher had not. 'Jonathan, remember what you said a long time ago, about loving the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn?'

'Sure.'

'I don't understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you.'

'Oh, Fletch, you don't love that! You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love. It's fun, when you get the knack of it.

'I remember a fierce young bird, for instance, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, his name. Just been made Outcast, ready to fight the Flock to the death, getting a start on building his own bitter hell out on the Far Cliffs. And here he is today building his own heaven instead, and leading the whole Flock in that direction.'

Fletcher turned to his instructor, and there was a moment of fright in his eye. 'Me leading?-What do you mean, me leading? You're the instructor here. You couldn't leave!'

'Couldn't I? Don't you think that there might be other flocks, other Fletchers, that need an instructor more than this one, that's on its way toward the light?'

'Me? Jon, I'm just a plain seagull, and you're . . .'

'. . . the only Son of the Great Gull, I suppose?' Jonathan sighed and looked out to sea. 'You don't need me any longer. You need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day, that real, unlimited Fletcher Seagull. FJe's your instructor. You need to understand him and to practice him.'

A moment later Jonathan's body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. 'Don't let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I'm a seagull. I like to fly, maybe . . .'

'JONATHAN!'

'Poor Fletch. Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly.'

The shimmering stopped. Jonathan Seagull had vanished into empty air.
 
After a time, Fletcher Gull dragged himself into the sky and faced a brand-new group of students, eager for their first lesson.

'To begin with,' he said heavily, 'you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.'

The young gulls looked at him quizzically. Hey, man, they thought, this doesn't sound like a rule for a loop.

Fletcher sighed and started over. 'Hm. Ah . . . very well,' he said, and eyed them critically. 'Let's begin with Level Flight.' And saying that, he understood all at once that his friend had quite honestly been no more divine than Fletcher himself.

No limits, Jonathan? he thought. Well, then, the time's not distant when I'm going to appear out of thin air on your beach, and show you a thing or two about flying!

And though he tried to look properly severe for his students, Fletcher Seagull suddenly saw them all as they really were, just for a moment, and he more than liked, he loved what it was he saw. No limits, Jonathan? he thought, and he smiled. His race to learn had begun.
 
Postscript by Marcus:

Well I hoped you enjoyed the book. It's been a very long time since I originally read it.

Here's a couple of interesting things about the author and book.

This was the original three part book. In 2013 Richard Bach took up a non-published fourth part of the book which he had written contemporaneously with the original. He edited and polished it, and then sent the result to a publisher. Bach reported that he was inspired to finish the fourth part of the novella by a near-death experience which had occurred in relation to a nearly fatal plane crash in August 2012.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is named after John H. Livingston, a Waco Aircraft Company test pilot who died of a heart attack at 76 just after test flying an acrobatic home-built Pitts Special.

The book was rejected by several publishers before coming to the attention of Eleanor Friede at Macmillan in 1969. She convinced Macmillan to buy it and Bach received a $2,000 advance.

So what happened to my gliding after my training.

Well it took a long time to rack up the flight hours required to attempt a solo flight, on winch launches you were lucky to get more than 4 minutes of flight!

Well the day eventually came and I took my first solo flight.

I took it in a Kirby Cadet.

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Slingsby Kirby Cadet TX Mark 3​

I had to launch, fly a simple circuit around the airfield and land.

Just me in a tandem seated glider, the wind and of course, the birds. :lol:

The result:

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I qualified and got my wings! :airforce:

I didn't persevere with my gliding or powered flight.

My last flight in a glider was circa 1992, a very modern sleek trainer that was 'tug' launched.

I chose a ground based technical aviation career instead.

See you at the next book.

~Marcus
 
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