56: 554-561

Page 556

"I myself did stumble [...] into that very Whirlpool in Time,— finding myself in September third, 1752 [...] as ev'ryone else mov'd on to the Fourteenth of September."
Pynchon proposes the possibility of multiple worlds co-existing in time. A discussion of the collapsing of realities into one reality, as well as the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics is discussed in the annotation for page 45. This theme comes up numerous times in Mason & Dixon.