Freedom Is Good, Dude - Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the rise of simpleton wisdom.

March 3 2014 

Freedom Is Good, Dude

Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the rise of simpleton wisdom.

        By Heather Havrilesky

 

Illustration by by Danica Novgorodoff

There are the books that change your life. Then there are the books that people tell you will change your life. If those people are stoners you met in college, then the books in question are either Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Pray that you don’t wind up with the seagull book. Because nothing is quite as bewildering as digging into Richard Bach’s 1970 novella, having heard over and over again that it will totally blow your mind, only to discover a story about a seagull who loves to fly very fast, rejects the flock (All they do is squabble over food, dude!) and is eventually reincarnated as a seagull angel. By these discriminating standards, one could argue that The Very Hungry Caterpillar offers profound commentary on the capitalist fantasy of overconsumption as path to elite metamorphosis, and Goodnight Moon presents a radical handbook for nonattachment to the material world.

Nonetheless, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of the best-selling books of all time, and it’s just been reincarnated as an e-book by Scribner. Bach’s brand new fourth section, written long ago but revised after Bach nearly died in a plane crash in 2012, mines the same unholy common ground between folksy wisdom and Eastern-tinged mysticism found in the original. In this way, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was always way ahead of its time, appealing to regular folks and new-age self-actualization types alike. The book is Tuesdays With Morrie meets The Celestine Prophecy—except with even less complexity, character development, plot, or concrete lessons to offer.
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