Pressure, Pleasure, and the Last Entries
Period: 1667–1669
The closing phase juxtaposes professional scrutiny, personal conflict, entertainment and concerns about sight; the surviving diary ends in 1669.
Literary reading guide
In the later entries, public responsibilities and personal pleasures remain tightly interwoven. Read the page-to-page rhythm rather than looking only for a final message or a single turning point. The diary does not become a conventional memoir merely because its last pages survive and can now be read backward as an ending.
What changes when a writer begins to worry about whether writing itself can continue? A daily record depends on time, privacy, health and the ability to observe. Keeping those conditions in view can make the last entries particularly resonant for anyone who has stopped and restarted a journal. An interruption is itself part of a personal archive.
Excerpts from this period
Short excerpts from the public-domain edition named on the guide page. An excerpt that ends mid-sentence is an excerpt, not a whole entry.
1 January 1669
Up, and presented from Captain Beckford with a noble silver warming-pan, which I am doubtful whether to take or no.
A gift produces a practical hesitation rather than a lofty new-year resolution. Source edition
31 May 1669
And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal
The final entry turns the loss of personal writing into a matter of identity and privacy. Source edition
An essay by the TAEONIA editors. Quotations are limited to texts in the public domain.