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
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
w