La Befana: The Italians Have It Right

In our Western world, old ladies are the most unequal of all.

Things are better than in the 1900s, when physicians defined middle age for woman as a disease to be treated with (oops, cancer-causing) estrogen and psychologists viewed it as psychosis.

But as even science provides more accurate ideas about old ladies, science is presenting old ladies with the same troubling old question, more insistent than ever. If the genes rule everything, why do we need old ladies? Old men, fine. They find a young girl and can father a child. But old ladies?

Evolutionarily speaking, is an old lady like a castrato, without the saving grace of the operatic voice?

The question goes beyond the usefulness (or uselessness) of old ladies.

Is anything not directly involved in physically passing on genes and ensuring their survival until the next round of reproduction of any use, evolutionarily speaking?

At heart, this is the basic post-religion question. It arose 150 years ago when Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species," and people are struggling with it. That's why the religionists fight so hard against teaching children about the amazingly broad revolution in scientific thought going on day by day.

Sometimes I put The Question to myself this way: "Do people have souls? If they don't, what does Bach's B Minor Mass signify? Why does it move me so much? Why is it regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of all time? How did Bach know I would love it? He is supposed to have written his music for the glory of God, so was he really writing for nothing?"

And sometimes, I put it this way: "Is there any scientific basis for what we think of as "good" character? What does being "good" mean? Is it to be selfish, as Ayn Rand insists? Does it mean to switch men at will like Dagny Taggert does in "Atlas Shrugged?"

Thomas Pynchon asked The Question at the end of "The Cyring of Lot 49," which is on my list of Great Short Books (more on that in a later post). Is there, as he puts it, "some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty" in songs, "or only a power spectrum?"

Daniel C. Dennett promises to answer The Question in a book I'm reading: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life." The book begins with a children's song:

Tell me why the stars do shine.
Tell me why the ivy twines.
Tell me why the sky is blue.
Then I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine.
Because God made the ivy twine.
Because God made the sky so blue.
Because God made you, that's why I love you.

"And then along comes Darwin," Dennett writes, "and spoils the picnic. Or does he?"

I'm willing to read 521 pages of small print to find out, and I'll post my conclusions.

Meanwhile, I'll observe that the Italians, who know so much more than the rest of us about food, hospitality, constructing a language that can be spelled by non-specialists, dolce far niente and so much else, have figured out the old-lady problem. Instead of viewing old ladies as evil, petty, obstinate, burdensome, tiresome witches, they have a special place in their popular culture for a figure called "La Befana," who comes at the conclusion of the Christmas celebrations on Jan. 6. That date marks the 12th day of Christmas, and depending on where you live, it's called Epiphany or the Feast of the Three Wise Men.

La Befana brings gifts, and she's so well loved in Italy that she has her own celebration. The lady holds a broomstick, but that's because she likes to clean house.

She is also wrinkled and clearly aged. But she smiles. That is a world away from both from the sinister witch-woman and the even more nightmarish old ladies who try to pretend they are still young in dress and demeanor. I will never forget a grotesque sight I once witnessed in a beautiful Caribbean setting. A lady and her gentleman friend -- I somehow cannot believe he was her husband -- were together in a rowboat. She must have been in her seventies, but she wore a pink-and-white bikini. She was not fat, but her poor skin was not favored by being so exposed. She simpered at her elderly swain, who gazed back at her adoringly. I know when the eyes lie, and the expressions on this pair were so far out of line they gave me the shivers.

The wonderful book "Elegance," a must-read for women of all ages, counsels woman above 40 against showing their knees in public. Let's not even talk about the midriff.

Greek and Roman myths have the wonderful habit of evolving into multiple stories. I doubt that this process follows an algorithm so commandingly elegant as that of natural selection, but it's charming and useful nonetheless. I especially like the version in which La Befana had a son who died, went slightly out of her head, heard about the infant Jesus and, convinced he was her son, brought him gifts to make him happy. Jesus, bless him, was delighted and in return made her the mother of all the children in Italy.

I don't know what I'm going to learn from Dennett, but I think everything I need to know I learned in that lovely story about La Befana.

But I'm in question mode these days, because my 3-year-old has started asking "Why?"