- Cassiopeia was the vain and boastful wife of King Cepheus of Ethiopia, who stands next to her in the sky. They are the only husband-and-wife couple among the constellations. Classical authors spell her name Cassiepeia, from the original Greek Κασσιέπεια, but Cassiopeia is the form used by astronomers.
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.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four