Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The New Complete Edition by Richard Bach, Russell Munson Read Free Book Online

down at the wave tops, and then bent into a hard pullup, beak pointing right straight back up into the sky, and rolled. A long vertical slow roll, twisting off into an impossible full circle in the air.
    Anthony stalled, watching; forgot where he was, stalled again. “I swear,” he said out loud, “I swear that was a seagull!” He turned at once toward the other bird, who apparently hadn’t noticed him. “HEY!” he called, as loud as he could. “HEY! WAIT UP!”







The gull pitched immediately up on one wing, moving at tremendous speed, blazed back toward him. Anthony in level flight, pulled hard into a vertical bank, and stopped suddenly in the air, as a racing-skier stops at the end of a downhill run.
    “Hey!” Anthony was all out of breath. “What . . . what are you doing?” It was a silly question, but he didn’t know what else to say.
    “I’m sorry if I startled you,” the stranger said in a voice as clear and friendly as the wind. “I had you in sight all the time. Just playing . . . I wouldn’t have hit you.”
    “No! No, that’s not it.” Anthony was awake and alive for the first time in his life, inspired. “What was that?”
    “Oh, some fun-flying, I guess. A dive and a pullup to a slow roll with a rolling loop off the top. Just messing around. If you really want to do it well it takes a bit of practice, but it’s a nice-looking thing, don’t you think?”
    “It’s, it’s . . . beautiful, is what it is! But you haven’t been around the Flock at all. Who are you, anyway?”
    “You can call me Jon.”
    JonathanLivingstonSeagull.com



The last chapter is not an amazing story, though it feels like it.
    How do adventures suddenly appear in one’s mind? Writers who love their work say that the mystery is a part of the magic. No explanation.
    Imagination is an old soul. Someone whispers in the spirit, speaks softly of a bright world and the creatures there with joys and sorrows and despairs and victories, the tale finished and beautiful except for the words. Writers swirl images to match the action they see, remember the dialogue from beginning to the end. Simply insert letters, periods, and commas, and the story is ready to ski down the slopes of booksellers.
    Stories are wrought not with committees and grammar, they spring from a mystery that touches our own silent imagination. Questions hold us puzzled for years, then a storm of answers come sudden from the unknown, arrows from a bow we’ve never seen.
    So it was for me. When I stopped writing the fourth part, the story of Jonathan Seagull was done.
    I read the fourth part over and again, at the time. It would never be true! Would the seagulls who followed Jonathan’s answers kill the spirit of flight with ritual?
    That chapter said it could be. I didn’t believe it. Three parts told the whole of it, I thought, doesn’t need a fourth: a desert sky, dusty words to smother joy, almost. It doesn’t need to be printed.
    So, why didn’t I burn it?
    Don’t know. I put it away, the last part of the book believed in itself when I didn’t. It knew what I refused: the forces of rulers and ritual slowly, slowly will kill our freedom to live as we choose.
    All that time passed; half a century, forgotten.
    Sabryna found the story not long ago, ragged and faded, squashed under useless business papers.
    “Do you remember this?”
    “Remember what?” I said. “No.”
    I read some paragraphs. “Oh. I remember, sort of. This was . . .”
    “Read it.” A smile for the antique manuscript she’d found, which had touched her.
    The typewriter’s letters were faded. The language was an echo of mine, though, way back then, a sense of what I was. It was not my writing; it was his writing, the kid from then.
    The manuscript ended, and filled me with his warning and his hope.
    “I knew what I was doing!” he said. “In your twenty-first century, hemmed about with authority and ritual, it’s strapped now to strangle freedom.