It has often occurred to me that many things in life generally considered to be Bad Things are, in fact, Good Things. Leaving aside some of the obvious ones (emotional repression, 2am corner shop £3.99 red wine, Quote Unquote, Martin Jarvis), let’s consider library fines. Few people relish paying library fines, and, speaking as a particular veteran of this eternal book-based war between laziness and fear of embarrassment, I have more reason than most to detest them; the toxic sense of disapproval oozing like radioactive sludge from the fearsome bespectacled shrew of a librarian (why are 90% of librarians now women?), the rapid disappearance of those useful pound coins and fifty pees from the bottom of one’s wallet (so much more usefully spent on wine gums. Or, indeed, wine), the vague sense of self-loathing.
And yet, I put it to you that the library fine is actually a monument to human ingenuity and moral sense.
For a start, one has to wonder – why would they exist, if not without damn good reason? I may not go so far as Alexander Pope and say ‘Whatever is, is right’, but I would say that whatever is, certainly deserves lengthy consideration. Has a successful borrowing library ever existed without a fines policy? Could you get away with returning your scroll to the Great Library of Alexandra late with no fines? I don’t think so. The reason is simple – we are a few library fines away from anarchy.
Human beings, doing good, as they do, usually (but not exclusively) only out of necessity and fear, would, without library fines, almost cease to bother returning books within squinting distance of the return date. To take away the library fine would be to take away a hugely important moral sanction, based, not so much out of fear of pecuniary disadvantage, as out of fear of disapproval. When I return a library book, I’d willingly pay double the fine to avoid the thousand exquisite mental tortures of the look on the face of the librarian. That species of glare, when you hand back a tome and she notices that it was due back in 1974 or whenever, has, etched onto it, that most hateful and soul-grinding of all phrases: ‘I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed’ (a maxim becoming frighteningly near consideration for the epitaph engraving on my headstone).
The exquisite and explosive implication of this sentence is due to the fact that it sets in motion one’s own conscience. Outright anger rarely has much effect on the sinner – if one has done wrong, the only way to penance is through internal realisation, not unreasoning external ire. No alcoholic recovers by being berated – they recover by having their own finer (lesser?) inner sensibility awakened by acceptance – and, in the same way, no library finee is going to find absolution for their borrowing lapses by the lash of the librarian’s tongue (which is, incidentally, why librarianship invariably attracts the passive-aggressive type). The librarian, in many ways the superego of the keen reader, depends upon the existence of the fine for this awesome moral power. The payment of the fine gives her the ritualistic opportunity to highlight one’s transgression. Having to actually mention the lateness of a return in some vulgar overt way would put the onus on her and make her look petty – the fine makes it clear that she is merely impartially upholding the eternal laws of library-based justice, and it is you, importunate reader, who is in the wrong.
Without this admonitory force, libraries would descend into chaos. People would return books later and later. Shelves would empty. Holds and reservations would become meaningless and futile gestures towards the unobtainable. Public libraries would be ransacked.
Library fines would, however, still be a Good Thing even if they did not underpin the system of moral discipline that facilitates the smooth functioning of the library. Their effect cannot be seen in mere utilitarian terms. They are a just and fitting marker of ethic transgression. It is only right that if one does wrong –if one neglects one’s social duty to return one’s books on time, thus upsetting the delicate ecosystem of mutuality, duty and rights that underpins the library - one deserves to be punished. It is a matter as simple as that.
This is all by-the-by. The real subject of my consideration in the category of ‘Things considered Bad which are actually Good’ is the related-but-different phenomenon of the hangover.
It is a seemingly obvious commonplace that hangovers are, basically, fucking awful. P.G. Wodehouse’s categorisation of hangovers into six types (The Broken Compass, The Sewing Machine, The Comet, The Atomic, The Cement Mixer and The Gremlin Boogie, since you ask) says it all. Hangovers, one instinctively reflects, are curious, compressed oceans of pain and disgust, invading your brain with stabbing pricks of light, heightening the senses to agonising degrees, making you feel like an elephant with diarrhoea stamped on and then shat upon your cerebral cortex.
And yet! Look, or rather feel, a little closer and a different impression emerges. I would call myself not a veteran of hangovers past but a connoisseur of hangovers to come. A friend of mine claims that he never gets hangovers (which given how much booze he shifts makes it one of the wonders of the world). I do not envy him.
Firstly, every hangover is a complex thing. It has its shift in moods, its changes in tone, its quirks of personality. Any seasoned aficionado of the hangover knows that each hangover is an individual, a unique phenomenon with a different character. And within this maelstrom of sensation, it seems obvious to me that patches of real pleasure emerge. I cannot be the first to point out the existence of that warm inner glow, that sense of internal displacement and floating tranquillity that makes up the middle part of the truly thumping hangover.
However, not even a masochist like me can ignore the obvious sensual torture that often accompanies the hangover – the lurching stomach, the swimming nausea, the knifing headache. Within the internal moral economy of the hangover, this is only right. The warm buzz only gets it effect from its contrast with the hellish torture of the initial shock and pain.
This illustrates the wider meaning of the hangover. When one is hungover, one languishes within one’s own depravity and sensual excess. One has a constant physical reminder of one’s own stupidity, a lingering moral commentary on the extravagance and squalor of the night before. This internal reminder motivates us, at least temporarily, towards sobriety, towards internal cleanliness, productivity, wholesome and upright conduct. One rarely feels a more bracing tendency towards and love of virtue than when emerging from the self-imposed depths of the hangover. It is only the contrast with the self-degradation of, among other things, the hangover that gives rectitude and diligence their value.
And, to look at it from completely the other direction, the debasement of the hangover ends up as a tribute to the profound joys of the grain and the grape. Nothing is a more eloquent testament to drinking than the fact that, despite it all, despite the nausea and vomiting and pain, we still return. Just as the folly of the Trojan war is the most potent illustration of the beauty of Helen, the pain of the hangover says more about the power of the joy of alcohol than anything else ever could.
As such, the hangover is a moving part in the complex mechanism of human motivation. We get drunk, and enter a wonderful period of openness, relaxation and sociability. We continue getting drunk, in an attempt to prolong the sensation, until we get sick. We wake up hung over. The hangover is a natural self-corrective to our heedless self-indulgence. In reaction, we seek contrast and veer towards the other direction, towards abstinence and sensible behaviour, gaining from this a due sense of virtue. Sensible behaviour soon cloys and makes us desire the release of booze and drunkenness as a suitable (gin and) tonic. An eternal cycle ensues, wherein one state creates the necessary precondition for the experience of the pleasure of its opposite. The smooth, as ever, requires and gains its meaning only from its contradistinction to the rough, in the case of the hangover, to feeling rough.
My point, insofar as there is one, is that we condemn too many things too easily, without duly considering their indispensability in the general scheme, the fact that they are part of and inseparable from the overall phenomenon, which must be understood and valued in its entirety, or not at all.
Consider The Fall, the longstanding band fronted by Mark E Smith (part genius, part utter-fucking-headcase, all Mancunian Jesus). The curious thing about The Fall, other than the fact that it has had more band-members than the average hedgehog has spines, is the sheer mass of music the ban has produced. There are God-knows-how-many Fall albums, singles and EPs. Listening to every Fall song would be the musical equivalent of reading every Charles Dickens novel back-to-back, like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust.
Of the hundreds and hundreds of Fall songs, many are utter snarling gems – Eat Y’Self Fitter, Hit the North, Totally Wired, Oh! Brother etc etc etc . However, the undoubted truth is that there are many, many deeply shit Fall songs, some practically unlistenable. Mark E Smith is such a bizarre, scattergun, addled mind that he tends to produce brilliance or dross.
However, this is the unalterable excellence of The Fall. You can’t cherry-pick The Fall. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle, or it means nothing. The peak only exists due to the trough. The Fall is everything, or it is nothing.
And just as without the shit, there is no Fall, similarly without the fines there is no Library and without the hangover there is no Drink. With that in mind, let us judge things that are ostensibly Bad more judiciously, and remember that even in the most seemingly harsh and unforgiving concept – say Noel Edmonds – there may be but some scrap of good.
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