Laudator Temporis Acti

Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), pp. 204-205:

Oppenheimer's concern with truth, goodness, and beauty led him in the early 1930s to a serious study of ancient Hindu literature; so serious, indeed, that he took lessons in Sanskrit so that he could read the Hindu texts in their original language. The first mention of this comes in his letter to Frank of August 10, 1931, in which he writes, "I am learning Sanskrit, enjoying it very much, and enjoying again the sweet luxury of being taught."

His teacher was Arthur Ryder, who was professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley. Harold Cherniss has described Ryder as "a friend half divine in his great humanity." In his views on education, he was a curious mixture of the ultra-traditionalist and the iconclast. He believed on the one hand that a university education ought to consist primarily of Latin, Greek, and mathematics (with the other sciences and humanities given as a reward to good students and the social sciences ignored altogether). On the other hand, his approach to the teaching of Sanskrit was refreshingly free from the deadening hand of dry scholarship. He regarded the learning of Sanskrit as the opening of a door onto great literature, not as an academic discipline. Perhaps for that reason he was the ideal teacher for Oppenheimer, who held him in enormously high regard. "Ryder felt and thought and talked as a stoic," Oppenheimer once told a journalist, extolling him as "a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary."

Id., pp.455-456:

Because of its use in this context (recollections of the Trinity atomic tests) by Oppenheimer, "Now that I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" has become one of the best-known lines from the Bhagavad Gita. Those who go looking for those words, however, often fail to find them, since in most English translations of the text they do not appear. The Sanskrit word that Oppenheimer translates as "death" is more usually rendered as "time," so that, for example, in the Penguin Classics edition, the line is given as: "I am all-powerful Time, which destroys all things." In the famous translation by the nineteenth-century poet Edwin Arnold it appears as: "Thou seest Me as Time, who kills, Time who brings all to doom, The Slayer Time, Ancient of Days, come hither to consume," which conveys an image diametrically opposed to that of a sudden release of deadly power. Oppenheimer, however, was following the example of his Sanskrit teacher, Arthur Ryder, whose translation reads: "Death am I, and my present task destruction."

Id., pp. 675-676:

Soon after he arrived back in Princeton, Oppenheimer received a letter dated February 1 from The Christian Century, a nondenominational magazine, asking him to "jot down — almost on impulse" a list of up to ten books "that most shaped your attitudes in your vocations and philosophy of life." The list he sent them was as follows:

1. Les Fleurs du mal
2. Bhagavad Gita
3. Riemann's Gesammelte mathematische Werke
4. Theaetetus
5. L'Education sentimentale
6. Divina Commedia
7. Bhartrihari's Three Hundred Poems
8. "The Waste Land"
9. Faraday's notebooks
10. Hamlet

Hat tip: Jim K., old and dear friend, with whom I've shared the six things (Panchatantra, tr. Arthur Ryder):

Six things are done by friends:
    To take, and give again;
To listen, and to talk;
    To dine, to entertain.