Evenings that change your life
The Girl Who Knew Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Heart
How to live life one word at a time
Thanks to Walter Bowne for his satirical piece Open Letter to Readers of Ayn Rand which brought back this memory.
When I was in college I knew a woman who could recite the entire of Jonathan Livingston Seagull from memory.
She was studying music and I was studying journalism. We were at a party thrown by someone in her department. Unsurprisingly, the music students threw better parties than the journalism students.
Her name was Dale Ladouceur. She is still a professional musician so I hope she won’t mind a bit of extra publicity. She plays the Stick in a number of bands. It’s an instrument sort of like a bass. Look her up on your favorite streaming service.
Three of us had retreated to someone’s bedroom and there was a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull on the bookshelf. “Dale knows that book by heart,” said my other friend. I can’t remember his name.
“That true?” I asked.
Dale nodded. “Some things I read just stick with me.”
I picked up the book. “Okay,” I said. “What’s the first line.”
She stared briefly up at the ceiling and recited, “It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.”
“Wow! That’s amazing! What comes next?”
Without missing a beat, she continued, “A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food.” She stopped and took a sip of her drink. “I can do the whole thing if you want.”
“How the hell do you do that?” I asked.
“Well, I just picture the first page of the book, and then I try to remember what the first word was. And then I think what word came after it and what word came after that one.”
“So can you tell me the last line of the book?”
“I could.” She paused. “But I’d have to go all the way through the book in my head. I can’t just jump right to the end.”
“Do some more,” I said.
And she did. She didn’t go through the whole book that night, but she did go through a good chunk of it. My memory is nothing like hers so I can’t remember exactly where we stopped.
I do remember it was one of the most lovely nights of my life. I sat on the floor leaning back against the bookcase. She sat cross-legged on the bed and read aloud to us. My other friend lay on the floor on the other side of the bed. He eventually fell asleep to her voice.
I kept reading along in the book as she spoke. She did not stumble or make a single mistake. I can still picture her sitting trance-like on the bed as she recited the words. She had long blonde hair and wore a loose-fitting peasant-style blouse and had funky wire-rimmed glasses. Her voice was calm and serene.
What a remarkable woman, I remember thinking. And what an amazing approach to life — just tackle it small bits at a time and the big picture will reveal itself.
I was young then and I had Plans. Partly because of that night, I stopped worrying as much about those plans. I started to pay a bit more attention to the smaller things right in front of me. Within a year I was working in the woods instead of an office. Within a dozen years I was living in another country.
Neither of those things were planned in advance, but they both felt like logical steps to take at the time. My younger self could never have predicted them. He couldn’t have jumped right to the end of the story. He had to go through it one word at a time.
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