American Epic
In the wee hours before the test, he drank coffee, rolled cigarettes, and read Baudelaire.
The test itself he named "Trinity", after one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
When the bomb was detonated, he recalled a harrowing image of Vishnu urging a warrior into battle from the Bhagavad-Gita.
Two weeks later, at the site of the explosion, wearing white overshoes to catch the fallout from the soil, he muttered, "'...lilacs out of the dead land...'". To which Major General Leslie Groves replied, "Come again, Bob?". In a few years' time, as director of The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he would proudly host one T.S. Eliot.
Dante, in the original Italian, was also a favorite.
But J. Robert Oppenheimer did not need Virgil, nor Vishnu, nor the three-person'd God to lead him through hell. He had F.D.R.
And his particular brand of poetry would set the world on fire.
Words & Voice: J. Robert Oppenheimer
Music, Sound, & Production: J. Christiano
