1984 | Page 3

and down the street and then had
slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fty. At the time he was not
conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily
home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising
possession.
3

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was
reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-
ve years in a forced-labour camp. Winston tted a nib into the penholder
and sucked it to get the grease o. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom
used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some
diculty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved
to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.
Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was
usual to dictate 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 di-
ary? 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 rst 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 dierent 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 ulcer had begun itching
unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became
in
amed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the
blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle,
the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin. Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what
he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down
the page, shedding rst its capital letters and nally even its full stops: April 4th, 1984. Last night to the
icks. All war lms. One very good
one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, rst you saw him wallowing along in the water like a
porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full
of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank.
4

then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there
was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with
a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright
and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into
her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although
she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible
as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets o him. then the helicopter
planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terric
ash and the boat went all to
matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm