'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An"
I tell you, no number--'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had
gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces.
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public
event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that
there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their
folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was
concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of
intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole
tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and
lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery,
which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed
everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary.
Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being
non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between
one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to
that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you
looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an
act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a
feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a
main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of
shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of
steps which led
.
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