At long last, a dear friend reached me by phone from Tehran yesterday. I had been trying to get hold of her for days, but cell-phone service has been cut, and Internet access, which is absurdly slow in the best of times in Iran, has been restricted to three unpredictable hours a day. With all the reports of street violence and escalating unrest, I was worried about her. She is not an activist, just an ordinary citizen whose family has been harassed by the Islamic Republic for nearly thirty years.

Last night, when she got through after two hours of trying, her voice sounded lighter than ever. Not giddy; lucid, bright, unburdened. She had spent the last days in the streets. She was one of the millions in Azadi Square on Monday. The energy, she told me, was indescribable. You could not feel afraid; the sense of common purpose was too powerful, and it had left her with a profound and nearly serene certainty that this movement would succeed. At Azadi Square, she spotted Hashem Aghajari, an old revolutionary-turned-reformist intellectual who became famous when he was sentenced to execution, in 2003, for saying that Muslims were not monkeys who should follow a Supreme Leader. (“We have a saying in Farsi,” Aghajari told me in 2005, the day Ahmadenijad’s Presidential-election victory was announced. “‘There is no shade darker than black.’ The worst they can do is execute me. I have prepared myself for that. If I am worried, it is not for myself. It’s for the Iranian people, for young people, today’s generation and future generations. My freedom and my life, and those of one or two people like me, don’t matter.”) Student demonstrators succeeded, back in 2003, in pressuring the judiciary to commute his sentence to two years in prison. Did I know, my friend asked, that Aghajari had lost a leg in the Iran-Iraq war? There he was, among the protesters at Azadi Square on Monday, holding his wooden leg under one arm.

Not an hour after this phone call, our dinner guests, an Iranian journalist couple forced to leave their country less than three years ago, arrived. It had not been easy to pry them away from their laptops. They were haggard and sleepless, the husband unshaven, the wife’s face a mask of desolation and fury. She had been watching a video of a student being killed by armed thugs. “Is power really worth this?” she demanded. “Khamenei has had power longer than some of those people were alive.”

Inside Iran, she told me, the demonstrators feel euphoric and confident, like my friend on the phone. Few of them are seeing the footage that has circulated outside the country. They are buoyed by optimism and also by anger: they feel that the authorities not only stole the election from them, but insulted their intelligence.