Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [151]

It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late ’fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 151

Note

Memory as a site of anti-imperial resistance — the one place a loyal citizen cannot be fully controlled. The tiny note that ‘London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London’ is a small heroism of certainty in the general fog.