Well hello, Marilee…
Marilee H., that is. She owned my copy of Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State before me. She was the underline-with-a-ruler kind—you the know the type.
I love seeing what previous readers scrawl in the margins, what caught their attention and meant something to them. But with Marilee, there’s all this truly hilarious stuff—Engels writes of early man, “Fruits, nuts and roots served him for food.” Marilee writes in the margins…“and carrion.” Um?
Meanwhile, Engels writes, “Man was at least partially a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained.” I write in the margins…“levitation?” Marilee surely would not approve.
Then again, she’s so excitable! Turn the page, and every mention of a tool of a particular stage of civilization gets re-written in her precise cursive in the margins, with an emphatic exclamation point following each repetition of the phrase—Cooperation! Use of fire! Inventive faculty! Bow and arrow! Sharpened intelligence! Strangely, she had no reaction to this line: “The bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword was for barbarism and firearms for civilization—the decisive weapon.” So I added it for her: Decisive weapon!
And here’s my favorite. Marliee reserves the double underline for occasions of special emphasis. So given the following statement by Engels, to what do you think she applied the double underline?
“The traditional view recognizes only monogamy, with, in addition, polygamy on the part of individual men, and at the very most polyandry on the part of individual women; being the view of moralizing philistines, it conceals the face that in practice these barriers raised by official society are quietly and calmly ignored.”
being the view of moralizing philistines, of course. She is also very approving of later attacks on the supposed morality underlying scandalized reactions to ‘group marriage’ and ‘promiscuity without jealousy’—clearly, she is not a woman in favor of monogamy and its double standards.
She also heartily approves of this line: “And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of it 50 to 200 proglottides or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its section with itself.”
Hm, I rather like that myself, actually…
So let’s shake on it, eh Marilee? I promise not to make fun of you anymore if you agree to keep me entertained for the last 200 pages. Deal? Deal.
