'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' by Richard Bach

This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they’ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.

MY THOUGHTS:

This was the bestselling fiction title for consecutive years 1972 and 1973, and its popularity spread by word of mouth through a world that was supposedly starving for its message. I was a toddler during its heyday, but I remember some of my unimpressed friends being forced to study it at High School in the mid eighties. I was in a different English class. Now, at last I've decided to put this runaway bestseller to the test.

It's all about how the intrepid Jonathan shuns the breakfast flock of birds to practice maneuvers way out of their league, such as eagle swoops. If there was a seagull Olympics, he would absolutely ace it. But instead he becomes a feathered pariah, since his peer group simply can't understand him. To them, eating is the most important part of life, not flight. 

 If I hadn't skipped reading this as a teenager, I might've easily been fired up by its message. It's hard to say in retrospect. At my current stage of life, I probably gravitate more toward the breakfast flock, whose lifestyle brings its own type of satisfaction if you manage to snag a chip or two. I guess as we age, a life of normalcy in which we feel no need to stand out from the crowd gains more appeal every day. The fact that this little fable sold like hotcakes in the early seventies suggests to me a horde of readers who each considered themselves to be radical, far-reaching Jonathans; lots of wannabe high-flyers who shunned the notion of simply scrambling after fish heads. In other words, few people admit to belonging in the breakfast flock, even though it contains millions of members. 

I believe we can still take the story's basic message on board, although some of us may choose to turn it upside down. I tend to think after decades of inundation with bestselling literature like this, it's now more radical to embrace a lifestyle of ordinariness without growing restless. Instead of speedy stunts in the air currents, we understand the peacefulness of bobbing in the shallows.  

This book really evokes the psychedelic seventies in which it took off. The story gets all spacey and strange, introducing notions of different incarnations, astral travel and higher spiritual planes until we finally reach some sort of enlightenment. And our friend Jonathan learns so much, he gets to skip several evolutions. It's all a bit way out and esoteric the further on we read. 

I can see how people call the book beautiful. The photos by Russell Munson are evocative and gorgeous. Jonathan belongs to a species of gull with golden eyes, yet most of the southern hemisphere seagulls I'm familiar with have either white or beady black orbs, so it increased my education. And the author Bach himself was a pilot, so he wrote his knowledge of aerodynamics into Jonathan's specky stunts, which is also pretty cool. 

But on the whole, I tend to think I'd be nowhere in this seagull centric world. I'm probably not aggressive and pushy enough to survive for long in the breakfast flock after all, yet I'm certainly not ambitious and driven enough to be a super flyer like Jonathan. Hi to any of my fellow lone, retiring gulls who may be reading this. 

Even though it surely helped define a decade's heartbeat, I can't quite bring myself to give this story three stars since I felt like putting it down several times. A bit too woo woo for me. 

🌟🌟½