David Prashker's Book Of Days: October 6

1973, 1887

The purple star marks my kibbutz

In terms of my personal history, there is scarcely a date or an event in the calendar more significant than: "outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, today in 1973". I had spent that first summer out of school in Israel, and thought that six weeks of my life in that pursuit was quite enough, with an entire planet of countries waiting to be seen, Judaism an uninteresting obsolescence, and this usurped homeland been and done. But on the Saturday following the Syrian and Egyptian invasion, when Israel's survival was still very much in the balance, and two of my friends from the summer announced that they were going back as civilian volunteers, like Hemingway volunteering for war correspondent duties in Spain in 1936, the wannabe writer in me recognised the potential, and signed up as well. The rest of that story is told in my memoir, "Along The Briny Beach", due for publication... eventually.

But today is also personally significant, if rather less intensely so, for "Le Corbusier", or Charles-Édouard Jeanneret on his birth certificate, born today in 1887 at La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, because he was responsible, by inspiration if not actually by personal design, for the school in which I had my first professional teaching experience, in 1976 and '77, a ship-on-a-cliff named L'Ecole de la Marine Marchande, in Le Havre, literally down the road from where André Gide once lived (his "Nourritures Terrestres" was one of the reasons I had started writing, and seeded "The Hourglass" in particular), just a short vélomoteur ride too from Etretat, where Impressionists like Monet, Delacroix, Courbet and Boudin painted so many of their pictures, and which got me started on trying to make some of my own... a splendid illustrated page on them and it here if you are interested.

But Le Corbusier. In "La Ville Radieuse", in 1935, he defined his vision, and I am afraid I cannot copy it in here without needing to include comments in the form of footnotes:

The Plan: totalitarian [1]

[1] My God, did he actually use that word to intend something positive!

The death of the street [2]

[2] How does that work? Out-of-town shopping malls, accessible only by motor-car and all-indoors? Hopefully it will never catch on.

Classification of simple speeds and complex speeds

Arrangements made to come to an agreement on imminent LAWS

of machine civilisation,

laws which can halt the menace of modern times

The mobilisation of the soil, in both cities and rural areas

Housing considered as an extension of the public services

The green city

The civilisation of the road replacing the civilisation of the railway [3]

[3] America did that - and what a bloody disaster! Mind you, there was never anything terribly civilised about the railway either - and most of the great cities grew up on the civilisation of the river or the sea (Jerusalem an exception, not many others)

Landscaping the countryside [4]

[4] Yes, he really did suggest that. Can you just imagine the armies of lawn-mower enthusiasts, out cropping Snowdonia on a Sunday afternoon, before trimming the leaves on Wyndcliffe!

The radiant city [5]

[5] Neon lights. Times Square and Piccadilly. Lovely!

The radiant country [6]

[6] Neon lights. Windermere Square and Pick A Dilly. Lovely!

The twilight of money [7]

[7] Bitcoins, or the Euro?

The essential joys, satisfaction of psycho-physiological needs,

collective participation,

and individual liberty [8]

[8] A fitness room and a psychoanalytic couch in every apartment building, next to the multi-faith chapel. All must participate to make it collective. All are free to refuse, on the grounds of individual liberty. Can’t we just couch-potato in front of the TV?

The renaissance of the human body. [9]

[9] And how about the renaissance of the human mind? Brain gyms. Don't suppose that ever occurred to you, since you clearly weren't using one yourself.

What an unutterably horrible world - and most of us are now inhabiting it.

The worst calumny in all this is not the false-pastoral nor the eco-friendly kibbutz idealism, but the theft of the poetic form for what is a concrete sterility. Interesting to compare it, though, with the "Cities of the Sun" envisaged by Tommaso Campanella a little over three hundred years earlier - my piece about him can be found here.

Amber pages

"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë, or actually by Currer Bell because very few women at that epoch were prepared to risk the social consequences of using their own name, published today in 1847

Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian ethnologist and archaeologist, born today in 1914

Hafez al-Assad, equally monstrous father of the current Syrian President, born today in 1930; though probably he should move to June 10, and have his GER day... but wait a minute, today, as above, was the date of the invasion of Israel in 1973. What a wonderful birthday present to dream of giving himself. Maybe this was the reason for the choice of date, and not Yom Kippur. Maybe he and his generals didn't even know that it was Yom Kippur, and that is why they turned and ran, thinking they were being ambushed!

Except that the symmetries of the Yom Kippur war date make it a requirement here. Assad's partner in planning and launching the invasion of Israel that autumn was the barely less monstrous dictator of Egypt, Muhammad Anwar es-Sadat, who was assassinated by one of his own army officers, for the crime of trying to make peace with Israel at Camp David, deliberately on the date of the war's anniversary so no one should miss the point, today in 1981.

* Update, December 8 2024 - this on the BBC website, and GER