The Year I Travelled to the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Western Hall

The Year I Travelled to the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Western Hall is one of Piranesi’s named years, a journal-era designation that also marks a period of exploration and record-keeping. Its surviving chronology runs from the year’s first day to the fifteenth day of its tenth month; much later, the journals associated with that period become material evidence in Piranesi’s effort to recover a history he cannot remember.

Chronology and Record

Journal No. 8 is labelled as covering the first day of the year through the fifteenth day of its tenth month. Journal No. 9 begins immediately afterward, on the sixteenth day of that month, and continues to the fourth day of the fifth month of the year the albatross came to the South-Western Halls. The labels make the named year a specific interval in Piranesi’s journal calendar, while showing that his notebooks divide time across volumes rather than treating each year as a single record.

The naming belongs to a chronology built around remembered discoveries and events in the House. Another journal’s original label, November 2012, was later crossed out and replaced with a span expressed in Piranesi’s named years. The contrast between calendar dates and the House’s event-based designations becomes significant when he tries to align the two systems and determine what his journals say about his past.

Journals and Material Evidence

The year is also connected to a period when The Other supplied Piranesi with practical means to continue keeping records: a new watch battery and ten new notebooks. Those objects sustain both timekeeping and writing, pursuits that matter increasingly as Piranesi encounters evidence that his own archive has been altered and that his memory is incomplete.

When he examines the journals, he discovers that the first three volumes were originally numbered 21, 22, and 23. Someone had scratched away the initial 2, leaving the numbers 1, 2, and 3; the remaining traces of white gel ink still reveal the old numerals. The transformation makes the notebooks appear to belong to a shorter, more recent history than they actually do. Entries in a younger, subtly different version of Piranesi’s handwriting refer to journals he thought did not exist, exposing a gap between his present understanding and the archive’s earlier state.

Torn Pages and Recovered History

The material record is damaged as well as renumbered. Piranesi finds that thirty-two pages of Journal No. 3, formerly No. 23, have been removed, along with the last ten pages of Journal No. 2, formerly No. 22. He considers whether the Prophet or 16 could have taken them, but the journals were hidden in his messenger bag behind a statue in the North-Eastern Corner of the Second Northern Hall, making their access difficult to explain. Since he has no recollection of removing pages himself—and already knows that he has done things he cannot remember—the missing paper leaves open the possibility that the damage belongs to his own forgotten actions.

That possibility gains force when he returns to scraps he had recovered from gull nests in the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall. He had painstakingly softened dried droppings with hot water and retrieved seventy-nine fragments from thirty-five nests. Among them, one bears page number 231, identifying it as part of Journal No. 2. By piecing the fragments together, he recognizes about thirty entries covering the period he had dated 15 November to 20 December 2012, including a long entry titled The events of 15 November 2012. The rescued scraps turn the House’s discarded paper into an alternative archive: the missing pages are not wholly lost, and their return begins to disclose the history hidden by damaged volumes and Piranesi’s uncertain memory.