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Do Your Darndest. In his own ingenuous way, Richard Bach has explained the message of Jonathan: "Find out what you love to do, and do your darndest to make it happen." That urging is what most of the thousands of people who have written Bach seem to take to heart. ("Your book isn't about seagulls at all. It's about how a painter must find his own form whether the public will buy it or not.") Says Science Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury, a great friend and fan of Bach's: "Jonathan, is a great Rorschach test. You read your own mystical principles into it." Rorschach test or not, Jonathan owes something to science fiction (thought movement, for example). It is also a mélange of contradictory religious messages. One is Hinduism (the goal of life is absolute perfection). Yet Jonathan emphasizes the self over all else, and that runs counter to Eastern religions. Insistence on the power of the self also undercuts the book's Christian overtones. For Jonathan is no fallen flyer needing God's help but an idea of perfection that can fulfill itself.
Until lately, Richard Bach was a reader in the Church of Christ, Scientist, and Christian Science is one of the strongest religious strains in Jonathan. Mary Baker Eddy taught that evil, death and birth are illusory. Her philosophy, like Jonathan's, projected man as a timeless being. The "real" person is the soul that has always existed, not the one we mistakenly think was born.
"I have been driven many times to my knees," Abraham Lincoln once admitted, "by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go." Jonathan Livingston Seagull clearly speaks to some kind of need in America for words of inspiration that do not instantly turn to ashes on the tongue. The Catholic Mass has been largely shriven of ritual mystery. Protestant sermons are soggy with sociology. Occultism, though thriving (TIME, June 19), comes on too much like fraternity rites staged by the devil's disciple. The old maxims ("This above all: To thine own self be true"; "I thank whatever gods may be/For my unconquerable soul," etc.) embarrass. Still, hardly anybody can live on irony and neostoicism for long. Even against what seems to be common sense, it is essential to believe in the possibilities of individual endeavor. There, suddenly, stands Jonathan Livingston Seagull, an Horatio Alger in feathers.
Beside him, increasingly, is Richard Bach. The book's jacket describes him in just 61 words. But this spring, Bach surfaced in a series of TV shows and autograph sessions. The result: Jonathan's sales soared from 5,000 a week to as high as 60,000 a day. Much of that jump derives from the Bach personality. A big, slope-shouldered, raw-wristed man, Bach wears a bushy mustache, a crinkly smile and a slightly bemused expression. He has a remarkable gift for saying tentatively, and with disarming humor, things that ought to sound pretentious or phony or both, but instead convince and captivate his listeners. The result is that after meeting Bach, even the veriest cynic is likely to find himself shamelessly rooting for Jonathan Livingston Seagull and curiously willing to forgive the book its literary trespasses.
Flapping Away. One of the things that readers ask Bach is "Are you Jonathan Livingston