The Diary of Samuel Pepys

The Great Fire is racing toward his street, and Samuel Pepys is in his garden digging a pit to bury his wine and a Parmesan cheese. That single act holds the whole genius of the diary: catastrophe and supper on the same scale, the burning of a city weighed against a cheese. For nine years he wrote Restoration London down in private shorthand he never meant a soul to read, and that secrecy is what makes him immortal: the playhouses, the scheming at the Navy Board, the guilty fumblings he hid from his wife Elizabeth, the Plague tolling its dead, all in one plain, hungry, unguarded voice. No one had ever set a life down with so little distance between the page and the man. To read him is to live inside the seventeenth century at the grain of an ordinary Thursday, never knowing which Thursday the books will keep. He stopped in 1669, fearing the writing was costing him his sight, and the most watchful man of his age fell silent rather than go blind. And so to bed.