A few months ago I found a paperback copy of George Orwell’s “1984” on a city bus. I opened it and found myself reading a familiar passage about the protagonist Winston Smith’s cubicle and the slot in the wall nicknamed the “memory hole.”
“When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying near, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the corresponding slot and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the basement.”
