“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
Kinglsey Amis, describing a hangover as well as anyone I’ve read in the utterly hilarious novel Lucky Jim. Like most great comic writing, it’s very hard to find representative excerpts; the whole of it draws you into a world of absurdity in which the punctuated observations of the author are at once side-splitting and deeply true, but require all the context of that world to make full sense.
