everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his
present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just
a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.
To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it
was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this
diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round
the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the
Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had
undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It
was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had
changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not
merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks
past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his
mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would
be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable
restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover
his varicose ulc

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