Opinion | In the Dark, We Found Joy

We took out a candle, lit it and finished our dinner.In darkness.

In complete silence.On April 28, the so-called Great Blackout, one of the strangest days of our lives, left all of the Iberian Peninsula in the dark.For over 10 hours we were completely cut off, unable to make phone calls or connect to the internet.

Later I learned the luckiest among us had found an old transistor radio with batteries to hear the news.The three of us — my partner, my 6-month-old daughter and me — had no such luck.

Now it was nighttime.Fear and all its ghosts might have lurked.Occasionally, a random car or a few pedestrians with flashlights passed by our window.

One might imagine the other things that were quiet.How the burglar alarms — the big business of keeping fear at bay — were not working.

How the security cameras had gone blind.That no one was able to call the police.

This, then, might have been a night dreamed of by thieves.A night when the evil-minded would seize the cover of darkness and all that silence to break into factories, businesses, shops, isolated villages, country houses or urban dwellings.

But they did not.This was no nightmare.Indeed, the Great Blackout was the opposite.

It was like a dream — a world populated only by the kindest among us, evil intentions quashed.Average citizens directed traffic at intersections without working lights.

Others brought water and food to passengers stranded on trains that had stopped in the middle of nowhere.Taxi drivers, unable to process credit cards, gave out their cellphone numbers so customers could pay their fares when the electricity returned.In the transportation chaos — the trains that stalled, the buses that didn’t come, the subways idled — some schools stayed open late that afternoon so no children would be left alone waiting for someone to pick them up.

Hospitals, always free in Spain, operated with generators and continued to care for the ill.Without working cellphones, children and teens gath...