Evolution is a fickle lady. Giuseppe Verdi would have loved her: La donna e mobile, he'd said. She cometh and goeth, often in circles. With luck, circles become cycles. Unfortunately cycles have zeniths and nadirs. On and on and on...
Little has changed since.
What
the ladies in the past didn't do, at least to my knowledge, was to
cover themselves with layers of paint beyond all recognition; pierce
their ears, noses, eyebrows and who know what other parts of their
anatomy, and generally pretend that they were out of season Christmas
trees. But even if they did, their external demeanor did not compare with the power they wielded the world over.
Their "within" was more important that their "without".
Don't get me wrong, I like women to look their best. I like it when a
subtle make up adds accent to the charm and beauty which nature bestowed
upon the weaker sex. Weaker? Tell that to some ladies I know! But, surely, not beyond
all recognition, let alone to detract from their individuality. But, apparently, this is just me.
Little has changed since Francesco Maria Piave had written those immortal words for Verdi, although they were even older. They were based on the 1832 play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo.
Ladies were fickle even then!
Perhaps we, men, like them that way?
Once we had a Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Indira Gandhi, Queen Victoria, Maria Theresa of Austria, Catherine the Great, even the recent Margaret Thatcher, hell... there were dozens of them. Dozens! They wielded power men could only dream about. And yet they were among the few. Yet, even then, they cared how they looked.
On the other hand, frankly, the same applies to men.
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Yet men do not have that problem. All they needed to do was to stop shaving and, lo and behold, they looked like monkeys. A mere few 5 to 8 million years ago the species diverged into two separate lineages. One of these lineages ultimately evolved into gorillas and chimps, and the other evolved into early human ancestors called hominids.
And now, with a single act of giving up shaving, men reverted to the look of their predecessors. Only one thing is missing: the intelligence hovering in gorillas' eye. Or chimpanzees'. Or any other monkey. Show me a single man who can survive in the environment in which the simians flourish, thrive and prosper, and I'll withdraw this statement. Millions of years undone with a stroke of a blade.
Or... the absence of it.
What both men and women, or at least many of us, have forgotten is that our external appearance does not define who are. Our power, our incredible potential, indeed, what may be described as divine potential, lies within us, not without.
And, luckily for us, the Age of Aquarius is here to revert the present trend. We shall discover that regardless of how we look, what we ARE is more important. In fact, it is ALL that matters.
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or
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