I opened the book and read the intro and preface:
Preface to Illusions by Richard Bach
It was a question I heard more than once, after Jonathan Seagull was published. What are you going to write next, Richard? After Jonathan, what?
I answered then that I didn't have to write anything next, not a word, and that all my books together said everything that I had asked them to say. Having starved for a while, the car repossessed and that sort of thing, it was fun not to have to work to midnights.
Still, every summer or so I took my antique biplane out into the green-meadow seas of midwest America, flew passengers for three-dollar rides and began to feel an old tension again -there was something left to say, and I hadn't said it.
I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.
But once in a while there's a great dynamite-burst of flying glass and brick and splinters through the front wall and somebody stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the throat and gently says, I will not let you go until you set me, in words, on paper. That's how I met Illusions.
There in the Midwest, even, I'd lie on my back practicing cloud-vaporizing, and I couldn't get the story out of my mind. . . what if somebody came along who was really good at this, who could teach me how my world works and how to control it? What if I could meet a superadvanced . . . what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into our time, with power over the illusions of the world because he knew the reality behind them? And what if I could meet him in person, if he were flying a biplane and landed in the same meadow with me? What would he say, what would he be like?
Maybe he wouldn't be like the messiah on the oilstreaked grass-stained pages of my journal, maybe he wouldn't say anything this book says. But then again, the things this one told me: that we magnetize into our lives whatever we hold in our thought, for instance -if that is true, then somehow I have brought myself to this moment for a reason, and so have you. Perhaps it is no coincidence that you're holding this book; perhaps there's something about these adventures that you came here to remember. I choose to think so. And I choose to think my messiah is perched out there on some other dimension, not fiction at all, watching us both, and laughing for the fun of it happening just the way we've planned it to be.
So I laid down to start the book and ended up reading half the book in one sitting. While I was reading I noticed something stuck between some of the pages toward the end of the book, in-between pages 146-147 (out of 192) was an old dried rubber band, apparently posing as a book mark. So, I guess I never finished reading the book and in one of the many many moves I have made as a nomadic gypsy in my younger years I threw the book in the tupperware bin, piled clothes on top of it and there it stayed.....until yesterday when I randomly found it. So, as in the preface maybe I was meant to find this book at this time in my life and actually finish it. Or I am just gona read a really good book that I never finished
Random awesomesauce:
More Food for Thought:
Moby Dick, The Rights of Man, The Screwtape Letters
I've read many others in between, but I always get interrupted on these particular reads within the first 30 pages and never get back to them.
You always find interesting images.