the Met(s)

Last night Pelleas and Melisande at the opera: heartrending,  solemn in its gloom and quiet
You can see why Proust loved this above all operas: he would listen on his Theatrophone, and cancel any other engagements, wherever it was playing
and to stay in that mood, I went the other Met, the museum, this morning, to look at the stucco figures and the Roman frescos -- the flying female figures in bas-relief, to send to Susan Salm and Frieder Danielis -- with whom I often go to see them... we always meet there, before going here and there, and usually ending up at the Brueghel Harvesters , and I always think of  William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel , about which there is so much to say and write
WHICH is the red stocking one, must look it up, since we were talking about it the other night,
ah, it is indeed on Brueghel's The Blind Leading the Blind:

The Parable of the Blind William Carlos Williams This horrible but superb painting the parable of the blind without a red in the composition and of course it does, one of the stockings is red..... and we were talking as well as about Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, and about Julian Bell's piece in the LRB about Salvatore Rosa (the jagged black line down the volcano into which Empedocles is about to hurl himself) and I indulged in reading from Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon -- about falling in love with a picture and walking in its light...