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As Oppenheimer reaches cinemas, The Quote gets much repeated.
For folks who haven’t read the Bhagavad Gita, a thread on why the most obvious interpretation of The Quote is, IMHO, wrong.
The Bhagavad Gita is likely a multi-authored work, inserted into a massive multi-generationally authored encyclopaedic Ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharat.
The core story is that of a mythologised civil war; there are good people and good arguments on both sides, but the protagonists’ side is led by a good would-be king, the antagonists by a villain.
Prince Arjun, a mighty warrior, is overcome with doubt and conscience. How can killing so many good, noble people, his own relatives, be right? He can’t fight.
Perhaps in the oldest version Krishna just told him to man up. But the later Gita stops time and has Krishna as the voice of God expound philosophically on how to live, in a message to all.
Arjun is convinced by Krishna-as-God that what needs to happen needs to happen and that, as a soldier, he has a job to do.
Later in the Gita, Arjun receives visions of God: God as Nature, as the Pantheon, God as Essence, and, in the end, God as Destroyer.
Oppenheimer does NOT think he is God the Destroyer. I believe the “I” in The Quote confuses people. Oppenheimer does not think he is God or Frankenstein.
Oppenheimer thinks he is Arjun. A soldier who has to do a dirty job, because it is his duty to fight good people led by villains.
The Quote compares the Trinity Test to the Gita’s visions of God. First, the radiance of a thousand suns. Then, the black, wrathful mushroom cloud, a Destroyer of Worlds.
Like Arjun, the dutiful soldier, Oppenheimer’s labour is also rewarded with a vision from God.
And like all soldiers, the vision they are granted is of the End of the World.