In Ireland, a Franciscan friar named John Clyn described life as “waiting amid death for death to come.” Near the end of his plague journal, Clyn wrote, “So that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave [extra] parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Beneath that paragraph, a brief coda appears in different handwriting: “Here, it seems, the author died.”
