What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubesled, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. Assoon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any parti-cular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that num-ber would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the correctedcopy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous altera-tion was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals,pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound- tracks, cartoons, photo-graphs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might con-ceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day andalmost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way ev-ery prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evi-dence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expressionof opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowedto remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it havebeen possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsificationhad taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far lar-ger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of personswhose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, news-papers, and other documents which had been superseded and were duefor destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changesin political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother,have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its origi-nal date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, wererecalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissuedwithout any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the writ-ten instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got ridof as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an actof forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, er-rors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right inthe interests of accuracy.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's fig-ures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one pieceof nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing withhad no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind ofconnexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much afantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great dealof the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For ex-ample, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of bootsfor the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked thefigure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim thatthe quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was nonearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Verylikely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knewhow many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was thatevery quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper,while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so itwas with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything fadedaway into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the yearhad become uncertain.
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