Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.
* * * * * * * * * *
In some ways, I've come to believe that Pynchon simply retains every bit of trivia about history and society and cows and phalluses and eras and decades because he always manages to casually write sentences that convince me of it. Maybe I'm just naïve and every author who writes a book that takes place in a past era researches it to such a degree that they also would never make the mistake of saying "the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human heads" in an era where everybody wore hats constantly.
Because in other ways, it's also possible Thomas Pynchon makes tons and tons of mistakes and the magic is how he's convinced me that every single thing he writes is accurate. It's much the same way in that I believe everything he writes about actually happened, historically, until somebody tells me otherwise. So until I see a documentary that expressly states that child aeronauts were not flying airships around the world in 1893, I'm going to go on believing that's the historical part of this novel and not the fiction part.
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