RICHARD BACH

It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle

sea. A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for

Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls

came to dodge and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day

beginning. But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore,

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing. A hundred feet in the sky he

lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard

twisted curve through his wings. The curve meant that he would fly slowly,

and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until the ocean

stood still beneath him. He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration, held

his breath, forced one ... single ... more ... inch ... of ... curve .... Then his

feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell. Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never

stall. To stall in the air is for them disgraced and it is dishonor. But Jonathan

Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that trembling

hard curve - slowing, slowing, and stalling once more - was no ordinary bird.

Most gulls didn't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how

to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that

matters, but eating. For this gull, through, it was not eating that mattered,

but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull 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. His glides

ended not with the usual feet-down splash into the sea, but with a long flat

wake as he touched the surface with his feet tightly streamlined against his

body. When he began sliding into feet-up landings on the beach, then

pacing the length of his slide in the sand, his parents were very much

dismayed indeed.