Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [362]

But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 362

Note

The ant simile and the ‘million useless things’ catalogue capture the tragedy of memory: lived detail is abundant but irrelevant; the scale of historical comparison is invisible to the witness. The chiasmus ‘when memory failed and written records were falsified’ plus the dread of ‘never again could exist… any standard’ form the novel’s central argument about how truth can be abolished — not by error but by the absence of any contrasting reference.