Feel Free: Essays

Zadie Smith

“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”

Zadie Smith on optimism and despair, superb read:

Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics

Lillian Lieber

Mathematician Lillian Lieber, of whom Einstein was a fan, on how the greatest creative revolution in mathematics illuminates the core ideals of social justice and democracy:

Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations

Werner Heisenberg

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”

Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr on science and spirituality:

Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity

Jonathan White

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”

Ursula K. Le Guin on art, storytelling, and the power of language to transform and redeem — a wonderful interview:

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

Henry David Thoreau

“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

Thoreau on knowing vs. seeing and what it takes to receive reality as it really is:

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

Lewis Thomas

“We are in for one surprise after another if we keep at it and keep alive. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never thought before, music never heard before.”

Beautiful read on our human potential and our cosmic responsibility to the planet and to ourselves:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks

“Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.”

Legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks on the building blocks of personhood and narrative as the pillar of identity:

If Apples Had Teeth

Shirley Glaser

A lovely vintage book illustrated by the creator of the iconic I♥NY logo — a playful invitation to question the way things are:

The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays

W. H. Auden

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act.”

Auden on the political power of art and the crucial difference between party issue and revolutionary issues — astoundingly timely read from half a century ago:

Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos

Monica Brown

An illustrated celebration of how the pioneering artist’s love of animals shaped her character:

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Essays

Jane Hirshfield

“The creative self [asks] the surrender of ordinary conceptions of identity and will for a broader kind of intimacy and allegiance.”

Poet Jane Hirshfield on how threshold spaces liberate creativity:

I Am Loved

Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni’s poems for kids, selected and illustrated by 94-year-old artist Ashley Bryan:

Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932

Peter Green

“Nature’s particular gift to the walker… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive.”

Walking as creative fuel — a splendid 1913 celebration of how solitary walks enliven “the country of the mind”:

Blob: The Ugliest Animal in the World

Joy Sorman

A playful and profound illustrated meditation on the struggle for belonging:

This Book Is a Planetarium: And Other Extraordinary Pop-Up Contraptions

Kelli Anderson

A pop-up masterpiece translating the laws of physics, from light to time, into playful and poetic tangibility – peek inside: