Most gulls don"t bother to learn more than the st facts of flights how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matter, 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 oneself popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, 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 (鹈鹕), the albatross (信天翁) 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 suce 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 reasons you fly is to eat. "
Jonathan nodded obediently. For the next few days he tried to behave like the other gulls: he really tried, screeching and fighting with the flock around the piers(码头) 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 (鳀类鱼) to a hungry old gull chasing him. "I could be spending all this time learning to fly. There"s so much to learn!"
...
"Why aren"t there more of us here Why, where I came from there were..."
"...thousands and thousands of gulls. I know." Sullivan shook his head. "The only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty well a one-in-a-million bird. Most of us came along ever so slowly. We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the flock A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth " According to Sullivan, what was one"s life goal