him.  Between meals, if  his mother did not stand
guard,  he  was constantly pilfering  at the wretched  store of cooking.net">food on the
shelf.
     One  day  a chocolate-ration was issued.  There had been no such issue
for  weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little
morsel  of chocolate.  It was  a two-ounce  slab (they  still talked  about
ounces  in  those days) between  the three of them.  It was obvious that it
ought  to  be divided into  three equal parts.  Suddenly, as though he were
listening  to somebody  else, Winston  heard  himself demanding  in a  loud
booming  voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him
not  to be  greedy. There was a  long, nagging argument that went round and
round,  with shouts,  whines, tears,  remonstrances, bargainings.  His tiny
sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey,
sat  looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end
his  mother broke  off  three-quarters  of the  chocolate  and  gave it  to
Winston

of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could
float  off  this floor like  a soap bubble.' Winston  worked it out. 'If he
thinks  he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do
it,  then  the thing happens.' Suddenly,  like a lump of submerged wreckage
breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't
really  happen. We  imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought
under  instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or
other,  outside oneself,  there  was  a 'real'  world  where 'real'  things
happened.  But how  could there be such  a world? What knowledge have we of
anything,  save through  our own  minds? All  happenings are  in the  mind.
Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
     He  had  no difficulty in  disposing of the fallacy,  and he was in no
danger  of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never
to  have occurred  to him. The mind  should develop a blind spot whenever a
dangerous  thought  pr