From the Bastiani Fortress II – February 27. 2026 - What will rise when we are gone

Torn paper by Sara

I knew the artist Sara for forty-five years. From that long acquaintance, I questioned the meaning of profitability. In the long run, if meaning and beauty are values, fruitfulness proves more generative than mere profitability. Artistically, she was not profitable. Only institutions that did not require profitability supported her work. Today her pictures still nurture people’s inner vision.

In the end, by her side, I once lamented that her wish to die on a deck chair, drinking coffee on the grass, had gone unfulfilled. She answered : “Here, held by the kindness of the healthcare workers. I am dying with a beautiful view of humankind.” The same week, the clinic announced the unit would close. It was not profitable enough. Care for the dying is valuable, but not lucrative.

When profitability and fruitfulness meet and remain intertwined, everything appears beautiful in the short, medium, or long term. But in many cases, profitability, despite its immediate returns, may inflict damage over time. Likewise, some efforts — even those that seem like failures at first — can yield a river of benefits for generations.

Entire orchestras are paid year-round across the world to perform works that a man once composed alone and penniless. Charles Baudelaire’s family reproached him for his erratic spending; his Flowers of Evil still enrich publishers and teachers and enhance France’s cultural prestige today.

Some of civilization’s finest forms of wealth are not profitable, and profit itself is not always fruitful. And yet: to be profitable in the long term, one often has to be unprofitable in the short term. Putting the essential before the urgent is an indispensable strategic investment — whether in art, care, education, defense, or architecture. This is how one endures across centuries. “What are you complaining about? There is no lost opportunity, for your role is to be seed.” Thus speaks the Berber lord in Citadel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In this mild winter, brothers travel by train, while sisters linger at their windows, and all of them gaze at the world through the sediments of childhood. Fathers and mothers have long gone, yet their perspective still quietly permeates the lives of their descendants, who in their turn drink coffee, read old books, fear death, and await the rebirth of desire. Just as those before us died so that we might grow old, we ought not to be the ones who harvest — nor even the sowers — but the seeds that contain all that will one day rise when we are gone.

Fort Bastiani : 

From the Bastiani Fortress - January 27.2026 - The Forces of the Spirit