A year of daily strips comes to roughly 360 small pictures. Read end to end, that’s about an hour. Less than most people expect, and about the length of a film.
It doesn’t feel like reminiscing. Reminiscing works top down: you decide to think about last spring and your memory hands you the three scenes it kept. Reading an archive runs the other way, handing you the days in the order they happened, including the four hundred you’d never have retrieved. The effect is closer to meeting somebody than to remembering them.
Density is the whole property
The difference between an archive and a pile of entries is coverage.
Twenty good entries scattered over a year is a pile. You skim it in four minutes and it confirms what you already recalled, because you wrote on the memorable days and the memorable days are the ones you’d kept anyway.
Three hundred mediocre entries is an archive, and it gives you the thing twenty can’t: connective tissue. You can see the run-up to things. The week before the job change reads completely differently when the eleven ordinary days leading into it are sitting right there.
That’s the payoff for lowering your standards, and it’s the only place the payoff shows up. Nobody believes it in month two.
You’ll find out you misremember
The consistent surprise, and it happens to everyone.
The thing you’d have sworn took months took nine days. The person you remember being difficult all summer appears twice. A period you’d filed as a write-off contains a fortnight of days that were obviously fine at the time. And whatever you now think the year was “about” is generally a story assembled afterwards, sitting on top of a year that was preoccupied with something else entirely.
Memory edits for narrative. A dated record doesn’t, and the gap between the two is worth an hour of anybody’s evening.
The shape of the year is visible from across the room
Here’s where a visual archive does something a written one can’t.
Flip a year of strips quickly, or lay them out, and structure appears before you’ve read a word: the stretch where every panel is indoors, the fortnight where the same person is in all of them, the month where the strips get shorter and the drawings get scrappier, which is usually the month something was going on.
Prose can’t do that. Text has to be read to be assessed, so a written year gives up its shape only to somebody who reads the whole thing, and almost nobody does.
The bad months are the ones worth having
People expect to enjoy rereading the good bits, and they do, briefly. The entries that turn out to be worth the most come from the difficult stretches.
Partly that’s where the detail is, since hard periods are dense and produce concrete, specific entries. Partly it’s evidence: a record of a bad six months you came out of the other side of is the most useful document you can own the next time six months start going wrong. It’s also the stretch almost nobody has, because it’s the stretch where everybody stops writing.
What an archive isn’t
It isn’t a highlight reel and it makes no attempt to flatter the year. Some of it is dull. Some of it is repetitive in a mildly alarming way, since you’ll notice you had the same argument nine times and recorded it nine times without ever spotting the pattern.
Anyone expecting the year-in-review-video experience will find it flat, because those work by throwing away 99% of what happened. Keeping that 99% is the definition of the thing.
How to read a year
Late December or early January, one sitting, an hour, phone in another room. Start in January and go forwards rather than dipping in, because the order is where the value sits.
Mark the entries you’d want somebody else to see, if there’s anybody. Notice which month you skipped, and then do nothing about it.
Then leave it alone. Read the same year again next December and it’ll be a different document, which is usually the point at which people work out what the daily entry was for.