At Harvard they all wondered what was it like to have a mind like his. The ones who knew him well enough to know what he could do, the ones who had seen him in action. Like the week in which he had learned to read and speak basic Sanskrit. And the several months afterward in which he had memorized the Mahabharata and began threading it effortlessly into his conversation. They didn’t say so aloud. They didn’t like to admit it publicly that Robert Oppenheimer was so uncanny and they were so merely human. He didn’t seem to be capable of forgetting things. He remembered everything he ever read, everything he ever picked up in a seminar or a lecture hall or in conversation.
The Secular Bar Mitzvah Of Robert Oppenheimer – Novel Excerpt
