Read Online Why Aren't You Smiling? by Alvin Orloff - Free Book Online

food in favor of flight experimentation. His flock, appalled by this nonconformity and flouting of tradition, expels him. After some time on his own, Jonathan is discovered and adopted by a secret brotherhood of seagulls who live to fly. Amongst them, he encounters Chiang, a wise old seagull who teaches him the secret of instantaneous teleportation: “Know that you have already arrived.” Jonathan then becomes a teacher and leads other seagulls down the path to Wisdom.
    On discovering the book at the library, I’d been so amazed at its cosmic significance that I’d immediately run out and bought my own hardcover copy, which I reread every few weeks. It was the first book to (as I thought of it) open my eyes to the Larger Truth behind the façade of physical reality. And though my experiments with instantaneous teleportation had come to naught, I still cherished it as a sacred and holy text. To hear the book put down so snidely made me furious. As soon as Gareth paused in his evisceration of Cat’s Cradle to sip his wine, I blurted out, “Don’t you think Jonathan Livingston Seagull examines some, like, really interesting theological questions?” I was secretly proud of myself for so deftly wielding the word “theological.”
    Gareth put down his wine in a manner that telegraphed his extreme exasperation. “It’s a one-dimensional parable in which talking seagulls spout platitudinous clichés.”
    I hated sounding stupid, but had to ask, “Does ‘platitudinous’ mean like a platypus?”
    Everyone erupted into laughter. I felt my face flush with total embarrassment and my throat closed so tightly I suspected I would never speak again. My mother thoughtfully suppressed her mirthful sniggering to explain, “A platitude is like a dull clichéd remark that’s supposed to be deep, like telling someone who’s just lost their job, ‘Life has its ups and downs.’ ”
    The laughter tapered off, but my humiliation left me frozen. Leona was the first to speak. “I do think Americans could benefit from a little more philosophical introspection. We’ve become so busy proving how smart and powerful and rich we are that we’ve lost the ability to connect with life on a more spiritual level. When Jeff and I were in Peru ,we once saw a peasant stop work and just sit, staring off into the distance.”
    Jeff took over the anecdote. “I asked him what was wrong, because being an American I naturally assumed something had to be wrong for him to stop working. He turned to me with a smile and gestured toward the sky and said, ‘What a beautiful sunset!’ And you know, it was an incredible sunset. I hadn’t noticed because I was busy rushing back to the shuttle bus.”
    Leona picked up the thread. “We spend our whole lives grubbing for money and forget about life’s intangibles.”
    Jeff: “Our Anglo-Saxon Puritanism has cut us off from not just Mother Nature, but our own human nature.”
    Leona: “If it takes talking seagulls to get us to slow down and take a look at ourselves, so be it.”
    Gareth drained his wine glass and addressed the table. “I’m not arguing that we should experience life on a purely material level, I just think that this Seagull book offers simplistic metaphysical …”
    My father interrupted. “But does meaning have to arise from complexity? Can’t the truth be simple?”
    â€œRight,” said Marie, with a coldly devilish smile and a flip of her bobbed hair. “If Peruvian peasants can find Truth in a sunset while their brutal, neo-Colonialist government traps them in ignorance and poverty, can’t there also be truth in a trite, poorly written, inspirational novel designed to depoliticize youth and distract them from their oppression with metaphysics?”
    Leona frowned. “I think encouraging spirituality is a profoundly political