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Hello, Robert Bruce Andrews here. Several years ago,
I stumbled onto a record album narrated by Richard Harris.
The story was not only very well told but was extremely thought provoking.
Years later, I found and purchased this book written by Richard Bach.
The idea for this project came in May of 1989.
I listened to this story, and I though "Why not make my own recording?"
I've really enjoyed this project, and hope that you enjoy this story as much
as I did. This sound track was originally written for
a few close friends. This is the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
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 in
to feet-up landings on the beach, then pacing the length of his slide in the sand, his parents
were very much dismayed indeed. Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is
it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the
pelicans, the albatross?
Why don't you eat? Jon, you're bone and feathers!" "I don't mind being bone and feathers, Mum.
I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want
to know." "See here, Jonathan," said his father, not
unkindly. "Winter isn't far away. Boats will be few, and the surface fish will be swimming
deep. If you must study,. then study food, and how to get it. This flying business is
all very well, but you can't eat a glide, you know. Don't you forget that the reason
you fly is to eat." Jonathan nodded obediently. For the next few
days he tried to be behave like the other gulls; he really tried, screeching and fighting
with the flock around the piers and fishing boats, diving on scraps of fish and bread.
But he couldn't make it work. It's all so pointless, he thought, deliberately
dropping a hard-won anchovy to a hungry old gull chasing him. I could be spending all
this time learning to fly. There's so much to learn!
It wasn't long before Jonathan Gull was off by himself again, far out at see, , happy,
learning.