Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”

We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.

In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathi...