No hangover is ever wasted on a writer. Kingsley Amis did it best. In Lucky Jim he writes of poor Dixon that “a dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse” and “his mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum” and “during the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police”. Then there’s my personal favourite hangover description, as voiced by Richard E Grant in Withnail & I, which is simply: “I feel like a pig shat in my head.”
Spare a thought also for the Scottish poet Robert Burns. “I write you from the regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned,” he wrote, promisingly, in a letter of apology after disgracing himself at a dinner party. “Here am I, laid on a bed of pityless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn, while an infernal tormentor, wrinkled, and old, and cruel, his name I think is Recollection, with a whip of scorpions, forbids peace or rest to approach me”, and so on — pathetically, actually – for quite a while.
None of this may sound like luxury. Until you spot in Burns’s words, through his thickly ladled-on remorse, something else too. Can you see it? That flicker of pride?
Think back to your own early hangovers. The teenage ones. As we grow older, we experience hangovers with disgust, cursing ourselves for failing to stick to orange juice. But back then they were battle scars. They gave us swagger. They were, the morning after, the evidence of the night before. “Man,” Burns is saying, “that was wild.”
Let us, though, go deeper, as Amis does in a collection of essays called On Drink. Here, a whole chapter is devoted to the thudding head. It comes in two parts, the physical and the metaphysical. The former, as discussed, can be fought in a variety of ways, albeit never that successfully. Whereas to fight the latter, he writes, you must first convince yourself that “you are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are . . .” and so on.
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This is not pleasant. It is, though, an altered state, and one in which we think differently. Surprisingly, philosophers, despite drinking and thinking quite a lot, rarely seem to cover the hangover. One notable exception is Aristotle, who wrote that the hangover “is more painful than drunkenness, because this utterly changes them, whereas the hangover produces pain in those who are themselves”. This is a profound thought and we will come back to it in a moment.
(For what it’s worth, Aristotle also thought that you could cure a hangover with cabbage. I can’t speak to that. I have not yet tried.)
Most philosophers are much more interested in drunkenness. Plato, Aristotle’s mentor, was a bit tortured about it. Being an ancient Greek, he was fond of the idea of altered states and conceptual transcendence. Just as drunkenness was understood as a Dionysian frenzy, Plato reckoned that great thinkers could reach an analogous sort of philosophical frenzy. As he puts it in Timaeus: “No man achieves true and inspired divination when in his rational mind.” You’ll find a similar sentiment from Oscar Wilde, on absinthe. “After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
Yet while Plato loved the idea of drunkenness, he knew that actual drunkenness was not, in the end, all that thinky. (See The Symposium, where Alcibiades turns up properly pissed and makes Socrates wear a hat.) And this is Plato’s conflict. He wants to be drunk and not drunk all at once. And in a way, don’t we all?
Which is where we come back to Aristotle and his tantalising observation that the hungover you is the real you, while the drunk you simply isn’t. With a hangover you are close, still, to the altered state of the night before. You continue to approach the world askance, but now you’re aware of it.
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It won’t last. Soon the usual comforting fog of life will return. But now? How pitilessly you survey the world. All of it – even yourself. So yes, your head is pounding and yes, you are flushed with shame for being a berk and saying that thing to your boss. But is there not a priceless sort of bitter clarity that sits in the middle of it all? All your pretensions and poses are revealed as ludicrous. And all you can do is to feel the liberation of that. You have never been more you.
Now, quick, some paracetamol before you die. Or some cabbage.
