Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

From the author:

After “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” came out, I’ve been asked many times: “Richard, what are you going to write next? After ‘Jonathan,’ what?”

Back then I answered that I don’t actually need to write anything else at all—no single word. My books already said everything I wanted to say with them. At one time I had to go hungry, sell my car, and all that other stuff, so it was quite amusing that I no longer have to stay working until midnight. But almost every summer I’d set off in my honorable biplane to sail over the emerald seas of meadows in the American Midwest, ferrying passengers, and I’d start feeling that old tension again—there was still something I hadn’t managed to say.

I don’t really like writing books. If I can turn my back on some idea and leave it there, in darkness beyond the threshold, then I won’t even pick up a pen. But from time to time, the front wall suddenly collapses with a crash, showering everything around with waterfalls of glass splinters and brick dust, and someone—stepping over this mess—grabs me by the throat and gently says: “I won’t let you go until you express me in words and write them down on paper.” That’s exactly how I came to meet “Illusions.”

Even there, in the Midwest, when I sometimes lay on my back and practiced learning to scatter clouds, this story kept turning in my head… What if, all of a sudden, someone appeared here—truly a master of that craft—who could tell me how my world is built and how to control it? What if I met someone who had gone that far along the path… what if a new Siddhartha or Jesus appeared in our time, possessing power over the illusions of this world because he knows the reality that lies behind them? What if I could meet him, if he flew on a biplane and landed in the same meadow where I do? What would he say, what would he be like?

Maybe he wouldn’t look like a messiah printed on the greasy, oil-stained pages of my logbook. Maybe he wouldn’t say any of the things stated in this book. Yet my messiah said: We draw into our lives what we think about, and if that’s true, then there must be a reason why this moment arrived in my life… and in yours as well. Probably nothing is accidental about the fact that you’re holding this book right now; probably in these adventures there’s something you encountered it for. I think exactly that. And I think that my messiah is sitting somewhere in another dimension—far from fantastic—watching you and me and laughing quite a lot at the fact that everything happens exactly as we had planned in advance.