April 4th, 1984

[Dänk 42Ø]

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 was reasonably certain that it would be punished by
death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. ... 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.

Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The
gin was rising from his stomach.

His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat
helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic
action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as
before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing
in large neat capitals --

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

over and over again, filling half a page.

He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the
writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the
initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to
tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.

He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether
he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it,
made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did
not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him
just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if
he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all
others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a
thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for
a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The
sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the
lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In
the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest.
People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was
removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done
was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
You were abolished, annihilated: 'vapourized' was the usual word.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a
hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of
the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot
you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother --

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the
pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the
door.


-- George Orwell, "1984" (edited)

[connie rahim]

nobody gives a sh---t what u think.