[Alan Baker]

swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons
swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature
at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too -- in some more
complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone
in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,
more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters,
more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and
insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was
whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his
spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the
table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated
resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this?
Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-
ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable
bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you
sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all
surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, comp