Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [919]

O’Brien smiled faintly. ‘You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ‘Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’ … ‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’ … ‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 919

Note

The Socratic exchange tightens the discourse of reality into a form of control: by relocating past-existence solely into memory, and memory under Party management, O’Brien turns ontology itself into an instrument — the past being controled precisely because it lives only where the Party already watches.