"What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the
pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know
in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened
to be necessary in any particular number of The Times
had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy
placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous
alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books,
periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks,
cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or
documentation which might conceivably hold any political or
ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by
minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every
prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary
evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any
expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the
moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a
palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as
was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the
deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than
the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons
whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of
books, newspapers, and other documents which had been
superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The
Times which might, because of changes in political
alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have
been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing
its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.
Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and
were invariably reissued without any admission that any
alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which
Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as
he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips,
errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to
put right in the interests of accuracy.
"But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of
Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the
substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the
material that you were dealing with had no connexion with
anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that
is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a
fantasy in their original version as in their rectified
version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make
them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's
forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at
145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two
millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked
the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the
usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case,
sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fiftyseven
millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been
produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been
produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter
astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while
perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it
was with every class of recorded fact, great or small.
Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally,
even the date of the year had become uncertain."
(George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 1. On-line at:
http://kulichki-lat.rambler.ru/moshkow/ORWELL/r1984ch1.txt )
--
Osarsif
{(George Orwell is a better prophet than the WT) Class}
