Daily Meditations · Monday, August 31, 2026
On planting for another age
"There is none of us who is not planting an olive-yard for his successor." — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 86
Seneca wrote this from Scipio Africanus's old country villa, watching an aged estate-manager named Aegialus graft new life onto trees so old everyone assumed they were finished. The letter is not really about farming. Seneca is arguing that a person near the end still owes labor to a harvest he will not eat, and he lets an old man tending someone else's orchard make the case better than any abstraction could.
The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris closed this week, on Sunday. Organized by the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou, the exhibition, on view through August 30, 2026, featured her Paintings for the Temple, 193 works af Klint conceived between 1906 and 1915. She built for a viewer she was sure she would never meet. She instructed that her paintings remain hidden until 20 years after her death, believing audiences of her time were not yet ready to understand her art. The crowds filing through the Grand Palais are the successors she planted for. Most work that matters ripens after the worker is gone. The question is whether you can labor at all for a season you will not see.
What are you tending now whose only reward will fall to someone you will never meet?
Source: mymodernmet.com →
