Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Most gulls don’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, though, 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.

“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? Son, you’re bone and feathers!” 

“I don’t mind being bone and feathers, mom. 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”

― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“- „Chiang, lumea asta de fapt nu e paradisul, nu-i aşa?”
Bătrânul zâmbi în lumina lunii. 

„Te desăvârşeşti mereu, Jonathan”, spuse el.
- „Bine, dar ce se va întâmpla acum? Unde mergem? Oare paradisul nu există nicăieri?”
-„Nu, Jonathan, nu există. 

Paradisul nu este un loc sau un timp. 

A fi desăvârşit—iată paradisul”.” 

― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull 

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

And I needed a rock. 

Something to hold onto, 

to stand on. 

Something solid. 

Because everything was going soft, 

turning into mush, 

into marsh, 

 into fog. 

Fog closing in on all sides. 

I didn't know where I was at all...

Silent Spring

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.

 

Journey to the End of the Night

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow, 

to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, 

where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, 

those projects that come to nothing, 

those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, 

which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, 

that every night will find you down and out, 

crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.

― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night 

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. 

I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. 

Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. 

Toward that end, I had to undergo training. 

I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. 

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. 

I wasn't anywhere. 

I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Chuck Berry Tribute

Chuck Berry, who with his indelible guitar licks, brash self-confidence and memorable songs about cars, girls and wild dance parties did as much as anyone to define rock ’n’ roll’s potential and attitude in its early years, died on Saturday. He was 90.

While Elvis Presley was rock’s first pop star and teenage heartthrob, Mr. Berry was its master theorist and conceptual genius, the songwriter who understood what the kids wanted before they knew themselves. With songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” he gave his listeners more than they knew they were getting from jukebox entertainment.

His guitar lines wired the lean twang of country and the bite of the blues into phrases with both a streamlined trajectory and a long memory. And tucked into the lighthearted, telegraphic narratives that he sang with such clear enunciation was a sly defiance, upending convention to claim the pleasures of the moment.

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