April 5, 1984
Dear Diary,
This
is addressed to a time when people are open-minded enough to think for
themselves; a time when one can read this and comprehend what it is trying to
say without being biased because of what somebody else has told them to think.
This is addressed to those who have not yet conformed to the patterns of our
lost world, but who decide to make up their own minds in all aspects of life.
I am addressing you to tell you about the presence of hell on earth. I’m
addressing you to tell you how corrupt we have become, but if this seems to be
cutoff somewhere in the middle, it is because they have already caught
me. It is because mankind has become so inhuman that me writing this to you
right now is an act of direct disobedience and I shall eventually be killed
for it. From a time of complete hatred, please allow me to shed my thoughts.
This
morning at probably about 2 o’clock (but I’m not ever exactly sure
anymore) I was awakened to sounds of a little boy screaming for his mother
because he had a nightmare. Since I had already been awakened, I decided to
stay up and listen to the boy tell his mother about his nightmare through our
thin and inadequate walls in the apartments. The dream of the boy (if I
remember right) went something like this. I guess that the boy had caught his
father in a Thoughtcrime and had turned him over to the Thought Police. The
boy became very proud of that and was a great citizen for Oceania and Big
Brother his whole life, but when he grew up, the Thought Police thought he was
to good of a citizen and decided to vaporize him like his father, but when he
was taken into the Ministry of Love for his execution, they told him that they
never really vaporized anybody but sent to the front lines of war and so there
he would go as well. The boy was glad that he didn’t have to die, but was
sad because he knew he probably would at the front lines. Well, when the boy
got to the front lines of the war, there was an enormous battle going on and
his superiors told him to get right in it, so he ran for the trenches. He got
to the first trench safely and found a gun to fight for a while, but as he was
running to the next trench a huge bomb went off he was buried in dirt and
bodies. When he finally dug himself out, the first thing he saw was the head
of his father he had turned over years ago to the Thought Police. This was
also the last thing he saw before a bullet hit him right between the eyes and
he woke up screaming. This may sound hard to believe, but in our world today,
it is not rare that children all over have nightmares like this every night.
After
hearing that, I could not go back to sleep so I stayed awake sorting through
all the different thoughts going through my head. I wondered if I would ever
live to see a day that my country was not at war, or if I would ever talk to
another human being about the way I was feeling. I thought about how we are so
lost in our ideas of what human culture should be like. I thought about many
things for a few hours, and then the dreaded work bell went off letting me
know that I had to be to work in fifteen minutes. Work is probably my favorite
part of life even though not really any part of life is that great. In my
work, although I love what I do, I always feel guilty when I do it. My work is
basically to rewrite anything that has been written that Big Brother doesn’t
agree with. I always feel like I’m writing lies. I feel bad for the people
who wrote what I am rewriting. I almost feel like I am erasing part of them
from history, and that is something nobody dead or alive should have to go
through. Although this is wrong to do, it is done everyday to any body who is
becoming too good of a citizen or is starting to think for themselves. I feel
trapped, because I have to do my job and I enjoy it, but I don’t want to be
involved in wiping somebody out of existence, but if I don’t do my job, I
will be easily found out and vaporized. These are some of the trials that I go
through everyday with the rest of the world.
Another
problem I have with my work is that nobody talks to anybody else. Nobody has
any true friends. Everybody is alone. Even if somebody is married, they
probably don’t share how they really feel about certain things with each
other just so that they won’t be vaporized. I have a very few acquaintances,
but none that I really talk to all that often, besides, I don’t think that
any of them like me very much anyway. It’s like being in a prison without
bars. Even the food is like prison, it is the most disgusting stuff I can ever
remember eating. I bet that the food we eat is just peoples brains and bodily
fluids that are vaporized, but if I said that to anybody, they would probably
end up eating my brain without even knowing it.
Oh,
another big part of the everyday hell that I live
in that I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned yet is the telescreens.
The telscreens are little cameras that watch you everywhere you go. They
follow you each step you take, and monitor every move you make. You cannot
hide from the telscreens; it is impossible. They are what the Thought Police
use to monitor you to see if you’re doing anything that you shouldn’t be
doing. That is why I am probably going to be killed in a few days. I’m sure
that they are watching me right now as I write this trying to figure out what
I’m doing. I can’t hide from them, so I just turn my back to it and hope
that I don’t look too suspicious, but I’m sure I do.
I
am literally risking my life to write this for you, but I need to let my
thoughts ventilate. If I keep them cooped up in my head for the rest of my
life, I’ll go crazy. I need to do something to let my emotions fly. I
can’t really show emotion in public so I chose to do it through this
journal. My emotions overwhelm me: confusion, fear, forgetfulness, grief,
incredible loss, depression. I just don’t understand how the world that I
knew as a child of prosperity, love, and even life has turned into such a
hellhole as this. I just can’t believe it.
If
someone not corrupted by this dystopia of a world ends up reading this, I
thank you for that. If nobody ends up reading this then I thank the myth of a
moral person who I wished would read this for giving me a reason to put all of
these thoughts of mine done on paper. Hopefully one day in the future one will
live who has love and compassion in their heart, but truthfully I don’t
really know what love is, I just know that it is a good thing.
W. Smith