“... most seagulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight – how to get from shore to food and back again. For must gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, though, more than anything else, loved to fly ...

 

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting ...

 

He didn’t know why, for instance, but when he flew at altitudes less than half his wingspan above the water, he could stay in the air longer, with less effort ...

 

It wasn’t long before Jonathan Gull was off by himself again, far out at sea, hungry, happy, learning. The subject was speed, and in a week’s practice he learned more about speed than the fastest gull alive ...

 

When Jonathan Seagull joined the Flock on the beach, it was full night. He was dizzy and terribly tired. Yet in delight he flew a loop to landing, with a snap roll just before touchdown. When they hear of it, he thought, of the Breakthrough, they will be wild with joy. How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s now a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly! ...”

 

 

Excerpt from "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by Richard Bach in 1970