A Brill Calendar: September 1

Few abstract structures are as powerful and as pervasive as the decimal number system.

The duration of an individual life human is measured in multiples of the number ten. Counting and reckoning serve as the fingerprint of any civilization, or culture that the planet has known; and will know. Anticipation and recording are birds of a feather; while letters and words, interacting with conventions and procedures, created throughout their evolution characteristic identities. Until deep in the Middle Ages, the Arab system of numbering was hardly known outside the Iberian Peninsula.

The tradition displays a superior typographical presence in Roman numbers. MCLXVI and 1666 are distinct. The invention and adoption, word-wide, of the magic number ‘zero’ has widened the expressive power of time.

It is seldom, nowadays, that the first day of the fourth and final quart of a calendar year is expressed by two letters: I and X. Together with MLCCCLXX and MCMXXXIX they define an era and a life-time. On the first of September 1870 the Germans humiliated the second French Empire by military means; exactly 69 years later the third German Reich invaded Poland.

The generation born in 1870 was in 1914 far too old to do battle; and when the crucible of the twentieth century started to blaze, on September 1st 1939, an era in the Kingdom of The Netherlands came to an end, an era which had not known or suffered military action on its soil for more than a century; an era that remained almost aloof from a culture of agony in Europe.