A great novel’s wordless pages

First there’s the Black Page: When Yorick, the town parson, dies, Sterne frames the words “Alas, Poor Yorick!” in a little box, and then fills the opposite page with black ink. For death, no words will do.

The colorful Marbled Page is the Black Page’s lighter twin. On the page opposite the marbling, Sterne warns readers to “throw down the book at once,” for

you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. Sterne’s printers used a different pattern for the Marbled Page in each edition, ensuring that Sterne’s “emblem” would change over time. Unfortunately, modern editions of the book usually reprint the same old marbling in black and white. To mark the page’s anniversary, and to get Sterne’s emblem moving again, an exhibition is being mounted in Sterne’s house, Shandy Hall, with 169 artists reinterpreting the Marbled Page.

“Tristram Shandy,” meanwhile, has been inspiring artists for hundreds of years. It was written in an experimental time, when novels were new, and hadn’t yet settled into a conventional shape. With the Black and Marbled Pages, Sterne created a singular work of art: He represented death and life simply and vividly, by balancing austerity and excess.

The ”John Henry” problem Could increased opportunity be bad for you? If it’s fickle or illusory, it might be. A recent article in the Yale Alumni Magazine highlights a phenomenon some sociologists call “John Henryism.” It starts when you respond to stresses beyond your control by working extra hard; if, despite your hard work, those same stresses keep you from succeeding, then the effect can feed back into itself, pushing you to work even harder. That kind of sustained, hopeless effort, some epidemiologists believe, can have long-term physiological effects. John Henryism takes its name from the legend of a mighty railroad worker who took on a new, steam-powered hammer in a contest. He won, but the effort killed him: As the song goes, “he died with his hammer in his hand.”