Впечатления: Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The New Complete Edition

По известности, упоминанию в списках любимых и вдохновляющих и будоражащему сознание эффекту «Чайка по имени Джонатан Ливингстон» если и отстаёт от «Маленького принца» Экзюпери, то незначительно. Что интересно, кстати, оба автора — пилоты самолётов.

Для многих людей книга стала просто символом свободы, выхода за рамки и стремления к совершенству.

How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

Бинбанк даже использовал её образы для создания своего логотипа и видения своей компании.

В общем, нет смысла пересказывать. Кто ещё не знаком, лучше почитать — времени потеряете немного, а хорошую порцию позитивного влияния на мироощущение получите гарантированно.

Данная заметка вызвана другим открытием.

Внезапно оказалось, что у книги четыре главы, а не три. Причём Ричард Бах написал сразу все четыре, однако публиковать четвёртую не стал, поскольку сильно мрачно получилось. Хоть и со счастливой, вроде бы, концовкой.

Но в 2013 году (изначально книга выпущена в 1970) он вновь наткнулся на свою рукопись и понял, что она отражает реальность.

И в 2014 была выпущена полная версия книги. Хорошо, что я решил перечитать её в оригинале, в целях практики английского, и наткнулся именно на этот вариант. Оба экземпляра бумажных книг дома содержат только три главы.

Четвёртая принесла новую волну озарений. Преимущественно в части восприятия религии. Но и ощущения от книги знатно перевернула. Не могу не привести спойлер, но оставлю его на английском.

The classes changed, with years, from wide soaring poems in flight to hushed talk about Jonathan before and after practice; to long involved recitations on the sand about the Divine One, with no flying ever done by anybody.

Fletcher and the other students of Jonathan were at turns puzzled and correctful and firm and furious at the change, but they were helpless to stop it. They were honored, and worse—revered, but they were no longer heard, and the birds who practiced flying were fewer and fewer.

…

One by one the Original Students passed away, leaving cold dead bodies behind them. The Flock, seizing upon the bodies, held great tearful ceremonies over them, burying them under enormous cairns of pebbles; each pebble laid in place after a long sorrowing sermon by a deadly solemn bird. The cairns became shrines, and it was required ritual for every gull who wished Oneness to drop a pebble and a doleful speech upon the cairn. No one knew what Oneness was, but it was such a serious deep thing that a gull could never ask without being thought a fool. Why, everybody knows what Oneness is, and the prettier the pebble you drop on Gull Martin’s tomb, the better your chance of getting there.

…

Nobody did any more flying than was absolutely necessary, and when it was necessary they grew strange customs about it. As a kind of status symbol, the more affluent birds began carrying branches from trees in their beaks. The larger and heavier the branch a gull carried, the more attention he earned in the Flock. The larger the branch, the more progressive a flyer he was considered.
A few in gull society noticed that by carrying the weight and drag of the branches around with them, the most faithful seagulls became disturbing flyers.

…

The symbol for Jonathan’s teaching became a smooth pebble. Then later, any old rock would do. It was the worst possible symbol for a bird who had come to teach the joy of flight, but nobody seemed to notice. At least, nobody who mattered in the Flock.

…

On Tuesdays all flying stopped and a listless crowd gathered to stand and hear the Official Flock Student recite. In a matter of only a few years the recitations stratified and hardened into granite dogma. “Ho-Jonathak-Gullak-Great Gullak-Oneak-have-pity-on-we-who-are-lower-than-sandfleas . . .”

…

In less than two hundred years nearly every element of Jonathan’s teaching was taken out of daily practice by the simple pronouncement that it was Holy, and beyond the aspiration of common gulls, lower-than-sandfleas. In time, the rites and ceremonies that were planted around the name of Jonathan Seagull became obsessive.