One Single, Marvelous Instant

And me, I thought, all my life I’ve been journeying towards the moment when I would soar up over the crowds of what the slogans called the workers and the peasants, the soldiers and the intelligentsia, and now here I am hanging in brilliant blackness on the invisible threads of fate and trajectory...*

Just one pure and honest soul is enough for our country to take the lead in the conquest of space; just one pure soul is enough for the banner of triumphant socialism to be unfurled on the surface of the distant Moon. But there must be one pure soul, if only for a moment, because the banner will be unfurled within that soul....*

This month we celebrate the 36th anniversary of the flight of Russia’s ‘Christopher Columbus of space’– Yuri Gagarin, a man who in his own lifetime was both part myth, and wholly mortal; the first man in space, he tragically perished at the age of 34, in a seemingly-innocuous flying accident.