By the end of three months Jonathan had six other students, Outcasts all, yet curious
about this strange new idea of flight for the joy of flying.
Still, it was easier for them to practice high performance than it was to understand
the reason behind it.
"Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom,"
Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, "and precision flying is a step
toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.
That's why all this high-speed practice, and low speed, and aerobatics...."
...and his students would be asleep, exhausted from the day's flying.
They liked the practice, because it was fast and exciting and it fed a hunger for
learning that grew with every lesson. But not one of them, not even Fletcher Lynd
Gull, had come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as the
flight of wind and feather.
"Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is
nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of
your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too..." But no matter how he
said it, it sounded like pleasant fiction, and they needed more to sleep.
It was only a month later that Jonathan said the time had come to return to the
Flock.
"We're not ready!" said Henry Calvin Gull. "We're not welcome! We're Outcast!
We can't force ourselves to go where we're not welcome, can we?"
"We're free to go where we wish and to be what we are," Jonathan answered, and
he lifted from the sand and turned east, toward the home grounds of the Flock.
There was brief anguish among his students, for it is the Law of the Flock that an
Outcast never returns, and the Law had not been broken once in ten thousand
years. The Law said stay; Jonathan said go; and by now he was a mile across the
water. If they waited much longer, he would reach a hostile Flock alone.
"Well, we don't have to obey the law if we're not a part of the Flock, do we?"
Fletcher said, rather self-consciously. "Besides, if there's a fight we'll be a lot more
help there than here."'
And so they flew in from the west that morning, eight of them in a double-diamond
formation, wingtips almost overlapping. They came across the Flock's Council
Beach at a hundred thirty-five miles per hour, Jonathan in the lead. Fletcher
smoothly at his right wing, Henry Calvin struggling gamely at his left. Then the
whole formation rolled slowly to the right, as one bird... level... to... inverted... to...
level, the wind whipping over them all.
Replies
I like this part, "the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as the flight of wind and feather".
Very nice !
Let me see, have I got this story correctly or not?
1-It is a fiction and all of those events are happened in Jonathan’s wake, not his dream.
2-He learnt flying from a teacher who lived in the sky during his travel to sky.
2-Now, he is able to fly and he is teaching it to others (some students).