Is AI on the verge of turning us into simulacra, a life-form that surrenders its mind to machines that homogenize thought and speak with the flat affect we’ve become familiar with in AI prose?

In many ways one would expect this particular species of diary to be the least intimate, the one a reader should be least shy to inspect: after all, the book on the workbench seems less vulnerable than the one on the night table.

And yet, we may have to take the most care of all in reading these books; because they are written by men and women whose words we are used to judging, we tend to put them to an aesthetic test we spare most of the other diaries in this book.

Soon the volume presents itself to him as a space into which he can move. … In fact, writing the diary is feasible at all only because Winston’s flat has a small alcove that was probably intended for bookshelves in the world that existed when the apartment house was built: “It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do…But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer.” … The book joins the actual geography; it becomes Winston’s secret room.

The books kept by those we now meet—the imprisoned, the frightened, and the slowly dying—are by and large more inspiriting than depressing. … For these people, diaries are not simply habits; they are attempts to create life, and if they sometimes fail, they retain the luster of heroism.

The sturdy intelligence so clearly at work in these diaries provokes a reader to admiration—and plunges him into lingering mystery. … It is a genuine conundrum. Speer finally illustrates not evil’s banality, but its centrality, its endless presence in people, its ability to fly like bacteria into the blood cells of the high-minded, breaking down their moral immunities and laying waste to their goodness.

Moving away from those imprisoned by and for enormity toward those jailed only by their own temperaments, we expect to feel a lower temperature of desperation. … But this isn’t necessarily the case. Whether they suffer from the freakishness of neurons, or a part of God’s plan, those depressed and frightened in the midst of the world are free in only some legal sense of the term.

O gold-and-silver ship, Godspeed into the darkness—for what are you but a last, fragile diary? Are you not the planet’s very own, forever whispering into the cosmos what all those other diaries shall forever whisper from their cupboards?