Jonathan Livingston Seagull Revisited

Does the inspirational seventies novel still inspire?

Jonathan Livingston Seagull came out in 1973, when I was ten, and I’m pretty sure I read it before I was a teenager.¹ It was one of the formative books of my young life, so much so that I recently gave my son an edition of it for his sixteenth birthday.²

But I had not revisited the novel³ in decades, so it was interesting last week to reread it (listen,⁴ actually) and see if it “holds up.”

For those who don’t know, JLS is the story of an unconventional seagull who delights in flying. While the other members of his flock see flight merely as a way to get food, Jonathan sees it as an end in itself, and devotes his life to perfecting its art. Richard Bach relates the tale in simple, but lyrical, prose that has about it an appropriately ethereal air:

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 twisting 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 con- 
centration, 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 disgrace and it is dishonor. 

But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretch- 
ing his wings again in that trembling hard curve — slowing, 
slowing, and stalling once more — was no ordinary bird. 

Jonathan’s experimentation and devotion to the craft of flight don’t sit well with his parents or peers, and ultimately, he is exiled for “his reckless irresponsibility” and “violating the dignity and tradition” of his people.

He denies the charge, pleading before the Council:

"Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and 
follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand 
years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a 
reason to live — to learn, to discover, to be free!" 

They don’t listen, however, and JLS is sent away, which turns out alright. Part 1 ends with us learning that Jonathan, despite his exile, lives a “long, fine life indeed.”

In Part 2, he finds himself awakened in another dimension where a seagull named Chiang takes him to even higher levels of self-discovery in exploring flight. JLS advances so far that he learns to move from one place to another instantaneously,

I will never forget Chiang’s lesson:

“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is," he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived . . . .”

Moving by knowing you’ve already arrived. There’s something beautiful about that. Even as it frustrates my sense of logic, it feels somehow true in the way that inspirational paradoxes often do.

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JLS was perhaps the lightest and most accessible of the new age novels of the 1970s, works like Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan,⁵ books that promoted the idea that thought creates reality, that we must separate ourselves from convention, find ourselves through individuality, and pursue freedom at all costs.

In part 3 of the novel, like the good philosopher in Plato’s cave myth—and like JC returning from the desert—Jonathan rejoins his people to educate them on truth.⁶

This part never struck me as forcefully as scenes of Jonathan practicing mile-high dives, wings tucked in, 200 mph speeds, turning with the flick of a feather before hitting the surface of the water—that and the business about flying anywhere instantaneously by realizing you’ve already arrived. And now that I’m older and I’ve embraced religion, it’s with different eyes that I read Jonathan’s speech to his followers:

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." 

These were intoxicating ideas, I’m sure, when I was twelve and even when I was twenty and reread the novel in college. But now I find myself asking, “Freedom to do what?”

Freedom, I now believe, is a tool, not an end in itself. When it’s pursued simply for its own sake, it doesn’t always end well. My old friend Matthew Arnold, for example, wrote,

The freedom to do as we like, so long as we do not interfere with the freedom of others to the same is a very good think in itself. But when it is held up as the whole of our social ideal, it tends to make people believe that what they like is what they ought to do.

But to give Bach the benefit of the doubt, JLS is not just “doing as he likes,” but is seeking perfection, an overcoming of limitations, and that is inspiring.

And as I listened to the book, I found myself sometimes thinking about my own limitations and pondering why I had imposed upon myself so highly a restrictive religious practice as Judaism.⁷ The book reminded me of my onetime interest in the easternish, New Age spiritualism, which is more eclectic, more seemingly “free.”

But Jonathan himself understands the rigours of constraint. When he is practicing his free falls, he has to learn to hold his wings still, to keep them tucked into his body, allowing only “A single wingtip feather” to move “a fraction of an inch” because “he found that moving more than one feather at that speed will spin you like a rifle ball.”

And Jonathan only advances to the highest levels of flight through mentorship, so this is not a story about self-indulgence or unconstrained freedom, but rather about passion and the pursuit of perfection, the desire to live for something other than eating fish, in other words, the desire to rise above the material. And in that sense, I can still appreciate the novel and find its message timely.

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Part 4

What I didn’t remember was that the book is also a pretty obvious allegory of the descent of Christianity from an inspired message to an oppressive institution. At the end of part 3, Jonathan moves on to another plane of existence, leaving behind his disciples to carry on his message. But, in part 4, after a generation or two, the purity of the message gets distorted, its lesson degraded into rigid ideas, superstitions, and meaningless rituals, ultimately at odds with what JLS stood for.

And, it turns out, there’s a reason I didn’t remember this. It wasn’t originally in the novel. Bach added Part 4 back in 2014— and with it, the novel takes on a more polemical tone, even more proselytizing a “spiritual, but not religious” message.

And yet, even so, JLS remains inspiring. At the end of the novel, centuries after Jonathan’s departure, another gull, Anthony, fed up with religious dogma, separates himself from the flock. But, absent a spiritual life, he finds himself in despair, confronting a meaningless existence, and sets out to kill himself with one final free fall into the sea:

Better not to exist at all than to exist like a seaweed without meaning or joy. It all made sense. It was pure logic, and Anthony Seagull had tried to live his whole life by honesty and logic. He had to die sooner or later anyway and he saw no reason to prolong to the painful boredom of living . . . .

But as he dives to his death, he is passed by another seagull, “a white streak blazing down,” who executes a breathtaking maneuver, and Anthony pulls out of his death dive. When Anthony breathlessly asks the bird who he is, the gull responds, “You can call me John,” we understand that JLS has returned, and that not even institutionalized religion can kill the message—or the messenger. It’s kind of beautiful.⁸

One reader on Amazon urges us not to read part 4 as it distorts or “ruins” the novel, and part four does tip the novel hard into explicit anti-clerical allegory. But I kind of like it. It seems not entirely out of step with the original. And it does make me think about my own choices to align with the sort of religion that Bach is critiquing.

Judaism, even more than Christianity, is a communitarian religion, and I sometimes miss the days of independent spiritual seeking. I sometimes question what I’ve gotten myself into, not that I intend to abandon my flock. This was a book for my younger self, and it served its purpose, but it’s good to be reminded of how I once felt.

And it may be salutory to be reminded occasionally that religion, all religions, doubtlessly get things wrong. I see a lot of Orthodox Jews struggling with the limitations of Judaism,⁹ wanting to fly free,¹⁰ and I get it—I think.

But the message in the book is not to discard faith and certainly not to abandon the search for perfection. And I do think that perfection can be pursued in religious communities. But sometimes maybe, in some ways, we need to go off on our own, figure things out, renew our faith in some unconventional way.

So, yeah, I guess JLS does still hold up, and I’m glad I revisited it.

1. Though it was a huge success, I’m guessing some of you have not read or heard of it. I know my students, to whom I mentioned it last week, had not.

2. And despite the reservations expressed below, I think it was an appropriate gift, illustrating as it does, the Blakean notion that “no bird soars too high, if it soars with its own wings.”

3. “Novel” is kind of misleading here. The whole thing is about 100 pages long, including illustrations. You can read the whole thing in an hour or less, which you might want to do before continuing this post to avoid spoilers. Here’s a link to the PDF if you’re interested.

4. The Audible recording is not bad but has an annoying musical background I could have done without.

5. Actually written in 1968, at least the first one.

6. And as in the myth, the crowd threatens to kill JLS at one point, though he easily evades them, in what feels like a pretty obvious allusion to Luke 4:29-30.

7. One answer, for me, is perhaps best articulated by the Eagles: “And freedom, oh freedom well, that’s just some people talkin’/ Your prison is walking through this world all alone.” Judaism reconnected me to community in ways that New Age spirituality never did.

8. This is an interesting sort of messianism. JLS comes back to the seeking individual, not the community. It’s moschiach one person at a time.

9. See, for example, Vitalist Jew.

10. See, for example, Exit 98