Word: reade
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rampage in the Stacks. Then came Harvard, "the most exciting time I've ever had in my life. It was like the Goths coming into Rome." Oppenheimer rampaged through the Widener Library stacks: he read Dante in Italian, got a "working knowledge" of French literature, dipped into Chinese, philosophy, mathematics. In his third year, he took six courses and attended four more (normal quota: five). He liked exams-"the definiteness and excitement"-and got A's. One Oppenheimer remark is a Harvard legend: "It was so hot today the only thing I could do all afternoon...
...without the friendships he had painfully made at Harvard, Oppenheimer was soon deep in depression and doubt. He convinced himself that he could no longer postpone "the problem of growing up." He read Dostoevsky, Proust and Aquinas and explored the defects in his own character. At Christmas time, walking by the shore near Cancale in Brittany, "I was on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic." He came out of this period of self-examination, he now feels, "much kinder and more tolerant-able to form satisfactory, sensible attachments...
...Stetson on his head and a bar of chocolate in his pocket, Oppenheimer liked to ride his horse Chico 40 rugged miles in a day, exploring the Sangre de Cristo Mountains up to the peaks. In the evenings, he would nibble on canned artichoke hearts, drink fine Kirschwasser, and read Baudelaire by the light of an oil lamp. He invented an abstruse variety of tiddlywinks, played on the geometric designs of a Mexican rug. Perro Caliente was "the kind of place one reads about in dreams...
Ryder taught Oppenheimer to read the Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit, his eighth language. Oppie still reads them, for his "private delight" and sometimes for the public edification of friends (the Bhagavad-Gita, its worn pink cover patched with Scotch tape, occupies a place of honor in his Princeton study). He is particularly fond of one Sanskrit couplet: "Scholarship is less than sense, therefore seek intelligence...
Novelist's Poetry. Meredith's career was full of such prodigies of creation. He sometimes had two or three novels going at once, while he also read manuscripts for the publishing house of Chapman & Hall (he was their chief reader, and discovered Hardy), wrote poetry, and lived a reasonably full social life. His friends were critics and editors, poets like Swinburne, naval heroes like Admiral Frederick Maxse, or permanent officials in the Treasury, like Sir Alexander Duff Gordon. "Socially, they were swells; but they were unaffluent and unconventional swells...