diary. For the future, for the past -- for an age that might be imaginary.
And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would
be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would
read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of
memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you,
not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically
survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had
to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into
him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not
broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you
carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen,
and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when
men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when
truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age
of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!

He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only
now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had
taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the
act itself. He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it becam