Sorry, got the day right, and the month wrong elsewhere:

In one of his always interesting articles, Mircea Eliade, the cultural anthropologist, gives his take on the dangers and powers of destruction. He notes that modern artists and architects have embarked many times on "sacred destruction" -- the destroying of worn out formal or sentimentalised structures -- with the hope of creating a new world. He points out that in earlier peoples there was this same instinct in ritual form: the periodic returning of the world to chaos and pre-order, because it had become "worn out". It must be all swept clean: the dead waste is choking out the new life.

He points out, of course, that dictators and radicals of all political stripes have caused great grief and millions of deaths in the past century in the creation of what the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia called "Ground Zero" -- wiping the slate clean of the past, which, freed of euphemism, means killing people, destroying history. But the impulse to clean the slate, to throw out all one's past and start again, seems to be archaic or sacred or have some kind of mythic power over us. Every time we clean house, or put a new sheet of paper on the easel, it pops up. It fights with the other impulse: to cherish, to sustain, to keep the memory alive, to find the seed in the existing flower. The worst part of the one leads to sheer destruction to no purpose, or to an all too grim purpose; the worst of the other leads to stifling reactionary shackles. The creative experience must probably be made up in part of finding the right rhythm between these forms of life. Certainly one thing lacking today is what archaic cultures had: forms of ritual that remind one that destruction is only partial, and embedded itself in continuing forms of cultural expression.