It’s C.S. Lewis’s Birthday. Born on this day in 1898, Clive Staples, that’s right, his middle name was Staples, get over it, wrote a great number of books, but you probably know him best for The Chronicles of Narnia. He was also a lay preacher, so you probably imagine he didn’t like a drink. And you’d be wrong. He was J. R. R. Tolkien’s drinking buddy, and if you were going to lay back pints with J.R.R. you better know your way around a pub. And he did. He also liked wine and the hard stuff, and wrote quite a few treatises about religious people being too uptight about smoking and drinking. He reckoned that God doesn’t want us to try to be Godlike, but rather wanted us to tear it up a bit. Because the God job is already taken. Top quote: “But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.”
