Regarding coal futures: more likely a reference to the quixotism of “selling coal to Newcastle”[1], and by extension to that famous Irish-American Quixote, Timothy Dexter, who indeed did so, and broke a miner’s strike thereby. The similarities probably end there; Mr Rosier was clearly a literate man, and Mr Dexter decidedly was not.
As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you’ve misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher—the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably the 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his “youth gang” era, and he tells us that
>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand …
-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident Mr Rosier disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, on which he dwelled for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his “Rosebud”. Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis. This is the hidden “atrocious or banal reality” behind the story, of the kind imagined by Borges and Casares that fateful evening in Buenos Aires.
It’s a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley’s project from Tlön: while Buckley’s ambition was the secret invention of an entire planet, the more humble Mr Rosier contented himself with the public preservation of an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood). Buckley’s motivation was an explicit rebellion against a God he didn’t believe in; by analogy I conjecture that Mr Rosier was quietly a believer, and his museum was a kind of temple in which, by meditating on one single speck of God’s creation, he might glorify the whole. I imagine the squabbling of the “pacifist” and “militarist” academics (both having missed the point so literally and completely) was a source of endless amusement for him in his old age.
As a post-script, I had to look up the meaning of manqué on Wiktionary, whereupon I experienced an uncanny feeling of vertigo at seeing a usage example quoted from an essay on Nikolai Fedorov. At once it unlocked the LW angle of the story: ancestor simulations.
[Reposting and expanding on my reply from HN]
Regarding coal futures: more likely a reference to the quixotism of “selling coal to Newcastle”[1], and by extension to that famous Irish-American Quixote, Timothy Dexter, who indeed did so, and broke a miner’s strike thereby. The similarities probably end there; Mr Rosier was clearly a literate man, and Mr Dexter decidedly was not.
As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you’ve misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher—the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably the 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his “youth gang” era, and he tells us that
>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand …
-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident Mr Rosier disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, on which he dwelled for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his “Rosebud”. Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis. This is the hidden “atrocious or banal reality” behind the story, of the kind imagined by Borges and Casares that fateful evening in Buenos Aires.
It’s a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley’s project from Tlön: while Buckley’s ambition was the secret invention of an entire planet, the more humble Mr Rosier contented himself with the public preservation of an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood). Buckley’s motivation was an explicit rebellion against a God he didn’t believe in; by analogy I conjecture that Mr Rosier was quietly a believer, and his museum was a kind of temple in which, by meditating on one single speck of God’s creation, he might glorify the whole. I imagine the squabbling of the “pacifist” and “militarist” academics (both having missed the point so literally and completely) was a source of endless amusement for him in his old age.
As a post-script, I had to look up the meaning of manqué on Wiktionary, whereupon I experienced an uncanny feeling of vertigo at seeing a usage example quoted from an essay on Nikolai Fedorov. At once it unlocked the LW angle of the story: ancestor simulations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coals_to_Newcastle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter