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 probably would’ve been punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston took the pen. It was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had gotten one simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a pen instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. He was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write. He dipped the pen into the ink and then stopped for just a second. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

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. 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 was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His thought about the doubtful date on the page, and then about the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK[6]. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him[7]. How could you communicate with the future? It seemed 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 this would be meaningless.

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to military music. He seemed to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks he had been preparing 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 the restless monologue that had been running inside his head for years to paper. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from a cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind. He almost wanted to write it down.

It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. It was very unlikely, but still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness whenever she was anywhere near him.

The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party. He was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. Winston had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him. It was because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself. He had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the main figure.