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 became important to
stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were
inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some
nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little
sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department)
might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval,
why he had used an old-fashioned pen, what he had been writing -- and then
drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and
carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which
rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this
purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of
hidin