1984 - Planet eBook

where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes,in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt alwaysof cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision ofLondon, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, andmixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a womanwith lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with ablocked waste-pipe.He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Dayand night the telescreens bruised your ears with statisticsproving that people today had more food, more clothes,better houses, better recreations—that they lived longer,worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier,more intelligent, better educated, than the people offifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 percent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, itwas said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Partyclaimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 perthousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300—and so it went on. It was like a single equation with twounknowns. It might very well be that literally every word inthe history books, even the things that one accepted withoutquestion, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there mightnever have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS,or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment asa top hat.Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasurewas forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in hislife he had possessed—AFTER the event: that was what