[Roderick Stewart]

the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept
that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his
fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph
itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's
hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence
which existed no longer had once existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its
ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when
he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it
must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had
betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes -- two,
three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been
rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had
the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed
continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that
he had never clearly understood 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