What the year requires is that a man stop treating orientation as an event and begin treating it as the standing law of his days. A year of pages can sharpen sight. Sight that does not become habit returns to the climate that produced the man. The age counts on that return. It can tolerate a season of seriousness. It cannot tolerate a type.
Young men finish cycles of reading and feel a false completion. They have been through the material. They have not been through the demand. The demand is repetition under ordinary pressure: the same measure applied to work, speech, desire, and fatigue when the novelty of the ideas has gone. Formation happens after the glow.
This conversion of a year into form is the residual form of the older traditional knowledge of discipline as duration. Initiation was not a mood. It was a binding that outlasted the ceremony. The man who binds himself after the ceremony of reading already performs the residual act.
Give the year a body. Do not archive it as an experience. The residual act is to let the measure survive the calendar that carried it. A year that does not change the type was only another circuit of the horizontal life.