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 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 th