[John McCoy]

why the huge imposture was undertaken. The
immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate
motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself
was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time
it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun;
today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in
holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being
a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be
wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of
Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his
own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you --
something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain,
frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the
evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and
two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that
they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position
demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence
of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of
heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would
kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after
all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of
gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the
external wo