Unwitting, unwilling Able (given name lost to time), born innocent, like all of us, and expendable, like some of us, was a rhesus macaque monkey of Kansas sent by NASA into the void to test the effects of space flight on mammals. The Russians had sent a dog. Those Russians.

Was it the golden light gracing the whole of New York Harbor as he crossed Brooklyn Ferry? Was it the new sensibility - expansive, liberating, imperative - he found in the pages of Emerson? Or was it the never-to-be-forgotten kiss upon his child's cheek by the Marquis de