El Greco and Antonio Lopez Garcia's paintings at the MFA

I liked all of Lopez's work, and his cityscapes in particular (contemporary views of Madrid seen from the concrete rooftops of apartment buildings). The building colors, faded from the sun, give off a kind of granite pink pastel light. They're huge. The city, painted in almost realistic detail, takes up only the lower third. Above is the pale almost white sky, dusty and smoggy, mounted like a summery halo.

I thought, "almost realistic". Where was the graffiti? Where were the parked and moving cars clogging all the narrow streets and alley? His Madrid is serene, spiritual.

Earlier, we saw the "El Greco to Velasquez" exhibit. What a great idea, having the two exhibits of Spanish artists staged at the same time!

El Greco's people are pale and gaunt. More than pale, they're chalky and starving. As if everything they've got is put into their prayers and devotions. One exception in the exhibit, in the painting, "Saint Martin and the Beggar", Saint Martin, mounted on a powerful white horse, gives half his beautiful green robe, to a beggar. The beggar is a young man, nearly naked, clean shaven, oddly fresh out of the barber shop -- and he's darker skinned than anyone else in El Greco's paintings.

Jose Saramago's novel, "Blindness": would people really do that?

It's been two weeks since I finished Blindness, but life at work and in my chorus has been too busy to post, and I wanted to think about the book. I frequently think about it.

The very first sentence does what a first sentence should do -- grab you. People in cars at an intersection are waiting for a traffic light to turn green so they can go. They cannot. Something is holding them up. At the front of the line of cars, a man is desperately yelling inside his car. He has suddenly gone blind. And his blindness is contracted by all who come near him. The blindness spreads from person to person like an electric current.

It was hard to put down. The characters don't have names. They have identities -- the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the sunglasses, the first man (the first man who went blind). I felt I was reading about a real world of flesh and blood people suddenly caught in a kind of hell where they faced extinction.

An entire world gone blind is that -- extinction. There can be no food, no organization, no leaders no followers, no future. Everyone will die.

I kept asking myself: would people act this way? The government treats the blind with immediate and brutal internment. Confined, the blind try to organize themselves. But the thugs among them are better organized; they form a gang that controls food and water in the detention center. They have a gun. They demand that women -- fellow blind inmates -- succumb to gang rapes. That rings true. Saramago tells us that we will behave like animals once our organizing structures and resources are denied us, and many will act instinctually to seize food and power. All will act, to some degree, without regard for the pain they inflict on others.

This is not so far from the moral atmosphere Primo Levi described in his books about the Nazi labor and death camps.