Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the pink noise of good conversation
On a study that finds good talk in the way it wanders off and comes back, a parson who drew his own wanderings and ruled a straight line to laugh at, and a corporal’s hat that no transcript can hear.
“I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line.”Tristram Shandy, Volume VI, Chapter 40
I The Coffee Shop
“Do not use action tags describing what each person is doing.”From the instructions given to Claude 3.7 Sonnet by Kathryn O’Nell, Kiara Sanchez and Emily Finn
In the 1970s two physicists, Richard Voss and John Clarke, measured how the loudness of music and of English speech rose and fell over time. The shape of the fluctuation came back much the same almost everywhere: small swells inside larger swells inside larger ones still. Engineers call that pattern 1/f noise, and some physicists call it pink. Then Voss and Clarke let noise compose melodies. By their own account, tunes driven by white noise, in which each note ignores the last, sounded too random; tunes driven by a slowly wandering source sounded too correlated; the pink ones sounded pleasing. The ear seemed to want a particular kind of unpredictability.
Pink noise has since turned up in the sway of a standing body, the variation between heartbeats and the rhythms of the brain. Conversation is a harder case, because the rhythm in question lies not in its loudness but in its meaning. That talk has the pattern there, and that people enjoy it more when it does, is the claim of a paper by Kathryn O’Nell, Kiara Sanchez and Emily Finn of Dartmouth, published in Science Advances on November 6.
The main evidence is the CANDOR corpus: 1,656 video chats between strangers, each at least twenty-five minutes long, after which both speakers said how much they had enjoyed it and how connected they felt. The Dartmouth team gave each turn to a language model called MPNet, which converts a sentence into 768 numbers. The numbers are coordinates, not criteria: sentences about the same things land near one another. Then the method measures how far each turn lands from the one before. Four hundred turns become a line of 399 distances, which the paper plots the other way up, as similarity. The study never asks where the conversation went. It asks about the rhythm of the line.
Rhythms of this kind come in colours. In white noise each value ignores the one before, like radio static; a conversation of that kind lurches from turn to turn and carries nothing across. In what the paper calls Brownian drift, each value stays close to the last, so the line moves in long spells; a conversation of that kind settles into one way of going on, and the Guardian’s report likened it to a rut. Pink lies between, with structure at every scale at once: two people holding a subject together, parting and closing in again, over a minute and over half an hour alike. A technique called detrended fluctuation analysis gives each conversation a number for its colour, about 0.5 for white, 1.0 for pink and 1.5 for drift. Then the conversation is set against a thousand shuffled versions of itself, and the share of them that come out less pink than the original gives a second score, between 0 and 1, for how robustly pink it is.
Most of the strangers’ conversations sat nearer white than pink, with an average colour of 0.62. But the more robustly pink ones were enjoyed more and left the speakers feeling closer. The correlations were small, 0.09 for enjoyment and 0.07 for connection. Across sixteen hundred conversations small is not nothing, but it is small.
The pinkness belonged to the pair. For enjoyment, the pair’s score carried a larger coefficient than either speaker’s own; for connection, only the pair’s predicted anything. And the ninety-four people who took part in five or more conversations were no more like themselves from one conversation to the next than like anyone else. On this evidence it makes more sense to speak of pink pairs than of pink talkers. The effect held at least as strongly in harder talk between college friends; it grew with practice; and a small test on speed dates recorded for podcasts, which the authors call preliminary, hinted that pinker first conversations were likelier to end in a match.
The paper’s introduction imagines the two ways a conversation fails. In one, two people each hold forth on a favourite subject, and neither takes up what the other says. In the other, one speaker simply parrots the other: perfectly in sync, the authors suggest, and boring.
The strangest finding is the last. The researchers asked Claude 3.7 Sonnet, an earlier model from the company whose later model assisted in drafting this essay, for a hundred conversations between two strangers in a coffee shop, each a hundred turns long and half of them enjoyable. Three of its instructions matter more here than the coffee. It was told that it had a habit of mirroring the style of whoever wrote to it, and that this time it should not. It was told that no one was to be described doing anything. And it was told that every turn had to carry at least one word. What came back were transcripts by instruction: no one shrugged, set down a cup or let a silence stand. Human readers scored the good dialogues far above the bad, 4.8 to 2.4, and the instrument found the good ones pinker. The machine had written the rhythm without a single gesture. The authors think it picked the rhythm up from the human writing it was trained on.
Hold onto the line of turns, the colours, the pair and the prompt. Each will come back, in its turn, in a novel published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767 by a Yorkshire parson who held that writing, properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.
II A Different Name for Conversation
“either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,——only keep your temper.”Tristram Shandy, Volume I, Chapter 6
The easy reading of the study is a story about agreement, in which good talk belongs to the good listener of the advice columns, who mirrors, agrees and never drops the thread. The study is less comfortable than that. Perfect agreement is one of its two caricatures, the parrot. Perfect independence, the two monologues, is the other. The pleasure lies in neither. It lies in a rhythm that holds and lets go, at every scale at once, and belongs to neither speaker alone.
None of this would have surprised Cicero, with whom the Guardian’s report begins. In De Officiis he warns against taking over the talk as if it were a private monopoly; in Walter Miller’s translation, he thinks it fair “for each to have his turn.” The rule of turns is very old. What is new is a way of hearing whether a pair is keeping it.
The study also redraws a familiar picture. The usual image of a good conversation is a straight line, on topic and to the point, though the conversations people remember went nothing like that. The study sides with memory. Its straight line is the parrot, every turn the same small step from the last; its scatter is white; and good talk wanders off and comes back, at every scale. What kind of writer would build a book on that shape, draw it, and then rule a straight line beside it for a joke?
In December 1759 Laurence Sterne, forty-six, vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest since 1738 and a prebendary of York Minster, had the first two volumes of his novel printed in York in a small edition. By the spring of 1760 he was in London, sitting to Joshua Reynolds. The book that took him there is the life and opinions of a man who cannot get himself born, told by that man, who cannot keep to the point.
Sterne knew from the first page who would be listening. In the fourth chapter Tristram predicts that the book will “prove the very thing which Montaigne dreaded his essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour-window,” and so, he explains, “I find it necessary to consult every one a little in his turn.” Two chapters later he names the relation he starts from, and the one he hopes to reach. “As you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other,” he begins, but “the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.——O diem præclarum!” The reader begins where CANDOR’s volunteers began, a stranger across a screen of print. Sterne means to end where the college friends start.
The method is set out in the twenty-second chapter. Digressions, Tristram says, are the sunshine of a book, and while he seems to wander from his uncle Toby’s story he is drawing his uncle Toby’s character, so that “my main business does not stand still in my absence.” Then comes the sentence the study could take for an epigraph: “my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.” The wandering is the advance, not a pause before it. Read with the study in hand, the last four words mark the difference between a line that goes up and then comes down and a pink one, in which both happen at once, in a sentence, a chapter and a volume.
Socrates complained in the Phaedrus that writing cannot answer back. Sterne’s reply was to build the answer into the page, and the passage that does it opens the eleventh chapter of the second volume:
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.
This is Cicero’s rule of turns, moved from the dinner table to the printed page, and the study has now put an axis under it. But Sterne also knew where any axis drawn through words would stop, and the rest of his book keeps pointing past it, to the turns that are not made of words at all.
III The Clock
“Besides this, there is another connexion of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom.”John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 33
The novel begins with a conversation that fails. Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father, is a man of fixed habits. On the first Sunday night of every month he winds the large house-clock on the back stairs, and he has brought “some other little family concernments to the same period,” so as to get them all out of the way at once. Tristram’s conception is one of those concernments. At the decisive moment comes the question: “Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” The novel’s first line of dialogue is an interruption, and the second complains about it: “Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?” The consequences, Tristram is sure, have dogged him ever since. Three chapters later he explains why she asked, and the explanation is the book’s first theory of the mind:
from an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp’d into her head,—& vice versâ.
Such combinations, Tristram adds, “the sagacious Locke” held to produce more “wry actions” than anything else. Locke had added his chapter “Of the Association of Ideas” to the fourth edition of his Essay in 1700, as a diagnosis of error: ideas joined by custom or accident in one mind, pulling each other into view. Sterne borrows the idea and teases it in the same breath. His whole novel runs on such associations, and most of them are private.
Set this beside the study’s line of turns. MPNet learned its sense of what lies near what from an enormous quantity of public text. It knows the associations a language shares: that “clock” sits near “time,” “wind” near “spring,” “bed” near “sleep.” Mrs. Shandy’s association between a clock and a bed is shared by nobody but her, her husband and Sterne’s readers. It is the Dartmouth instrument turned on a bedroom. A measure built on common usage would most likely score her leap as a change of subject, a jump in the line of distances. To her it is no jump at all.
Here Sterne’s method shows its courtesy. A private association, left unexplained, is noise to everyone but its owner. Tristram’s digressions are private associations explained: he takes the reader down the hidden path, and the path becomes shared in the walking. A monologuer leaps and leaves you behind. Tristram leaps and holds out his hand. The household, though, has not learned the method. The rest of the novel’s talk takes place among people who leap and do not explain.
IV The Lanthorn and the Smoak-Jack
“I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoak-jack.”Tristram Shandy, Volume III, Chapter 18
Walter is a retired Turkey merchant with a theory for everything: names, noses, the education of sons. His brother Toby is a retired captain who received, at the siege of Namur, a wound that “struck full upon my uncle Toby’s groin,” and who rebuilds the sieges of Flanders in miniature on the bowling green with his servant, Corporal Trim. For most of the book the brothers are the paper’s first caricature, staged in a parlour: two men each holding forth on a favourite subject, their talk crossing without ever meeting.
When anything is offered him that he thinks very absurd, Toby answers by whistling “half a dozen bars of Lillabullero,” which Tristram, with mock gravity, names the Argumentum Fistulatorium. It is a turn with no words in it, the kind the Dartmouth prompt ruled out.
The third volume gives the crossing its theory. Walter lectures Toby on Locke’s account of duration: our ideas pass, he says, like “images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle.” Toby replies that his are more like a smoak-jack, the contraption that turns a spit over a kitchen fire. Walter is talking philosophy and Toby is talking machinery. Each answers, and neither answers the other.
The fifth volume gives the crossing its finest form. The letter announcing the death of Walter’s elder son, Bobby, reaches the parlour, and Walter meets grief with learning. In the middle of an oration on death he recites, as if from memory of his own travels, the famous letter of consolation that Servius Sulpicius wrote to Cicero on the death of his daughter Tullia:
Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from Ægina towards Megara, (when can this have been? thought my uncle Toby) I began to view the country round about. Ægina was behind me, Megara was before, Pyræus on the right hand, Corinth on the left.
The recital goes on past the ruined cities to its consolation, that a man should not disturb his soul for the loss of a child, and ends, “remember thou art a man.” Toby has a question, and he holds it. Sterne is exact about how it finally arrives:
And pray, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, laying the end of his pipe upon my father’s hand in a kindly way of interruption——but waiting till he finished the account——what year of our Lord was this?
’Twas no year of our Lord, replied my father.
That’s impossible, cried my uncle Toby.
Simpleton! said my father,—’twas forty years before Christ was born.
The words cross completely. Walter’s borrowed traveller is a Roman of Cicero’s day, sailing the Saronic Gulf, and Toby is trying to date his brother’s voyage. But look at how Toby’s turn is made. It forms first in silence, inside a parenthesis, when can this have been? thought my uncle Toby, a question that never reaches the air. Then he waits for his brother to finish. Then, as he speaks, the pipe goes onto Walter’s hand, “in a kindly way of interruption.” Kindly is Sterne’s word. The words go past each other while the kindness travels by the pipe.
The parlour shows two of the study’s colours at once. As far as words go, the exchange is white: each turn lands far from the last, and nothing carries across. And whatever subject the parlour starts on, Toby’s mind tilts toward ravelins and counterscarps: a rut, in the Guardian’s word. Call it drift, provided the study’s finding is kept in mind: the colours belong mostly to pairs, not to talkers. Toby is a different talker in different company. On the bowling green with Trim, each takes up what the other offers, and the sieges rise.
The brothers’ warmest scene is in the second volume, and it is made almost entirely of looks and hands. When Walter has “done insulting his HOBBY-HORSE,” Toby answers with a look. He raises his eyes to his brother’s face with a countenance “so placid;—so fraternal;—so inexpressibly tender towards him,” that it goes to Walter’s heart. Walter rises, “seizing hold of both my uncle Toby’s hands”:
Brother Toby, said he,—I beg thy pardon;—forgive, I pray thee, this rash humour which my mother gave me.——My dear, dear brother, answer’d my uncle Toby, rising up by my father’s help, say no more about it.
Set down as words alone, the exchange is two formulas, an apology and its acceptance. The work was done before anyone spoke. The brothers almost never meet on a topic, and they meet constantly in feeling: in a face, in two hands, in a pipe laid on a brother’s hand.
V The Breeches
“You never will distinguish, Mrs. Shandy, nor shall I ever teach you to do it, betwixt a point of pleasure and a point of convenience.”Tristram Shandy, Volume VI, Chapter 18
If the brothers are the paper’s first caricature, Mrs. Shandy comes as near as the book allows to its second. In the sixth volume Walter, in bed on a Sunday night, opens the question of putting the young Tristram into breeches. “We should so,” she says, and from then on she agrees with everything. When he says the boy is growing a very tall lad, she says he is very tall for his age. When he says he is very short himself, she tells him he is very short. She agrees with each proposal and then with the next one:
They should be of leather, said my father, turning him about again.——
They will last him, said my mother, the longest.
But he can have no linings to ’em, replied my father.——
He cannot, said my mother.
’Twere better to have them of fustian, quoth my father.
Nothing can be better, quoth my mother.——
Except dimity,—replied my father:——’Tis best of all,—replied my mother.
One must not give him his death, however,—interrupted my father.
By no means, said my mother:——and so the dialogue stood still again.
Sterne’s “again” is earned: the talk keeps stalling, and Walter has to break the silence “the fourth time” before he gets to the point. When at last he presses her, “But don’t you think it right?”, she gives him the answer that undoes him. “Perfectly, said my mother, if it pleases you, Mr. Shandy.” “There’s for you! cried my father, losing temper——Pleases me!”
Now and then she hands his own words back to him; more often she simply assents. So she is not quite the paper’s parrot, but the effect is the same. A partner who goes along with everything leaves the other speaker nothing to push against, and Walter, who lives to argue, is never angrier than when his wife agrees with him. This is the ruled line in a nightgown. Draw the conversation as the study would and it barely moves: each reply sits beside the proposal before it, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left. That is not harmony. It is the shape of talk that has stopped.
The two caricatures share one failure. The brothers cross because neither takes up what the other offers. The marriage stands still because one partner takes up everything and adds nothing. Good talk needs a partner who can go along and also push back, and in Shandy Hall the person who does both is a servant.
VI Trim’s Hat
“a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room,—or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.”Tristram Shandy, Volume VI, Chapter 5
While Walter makes his oration in the parlour, Obadiah carries the news of Bobby’s death to the kitchen. Sterne puts the servants on stage together, Obadiah, Susannah, the scullion and the rest, and lets each of them meet death through a private association. “A green sattin night-gown of my mother’s, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which Obadiah’s exclamation brought into Susannah’s head.” Tristram’s comment is one line long: “Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words.” Locke had written such a chapter, and Sterne knew it. Susannah’s next thought follows: “Then, quoth Susannah, we must all go into mourning.” And Corporal Trim speaks:
Are we not here now, continued the corporal, (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability)——and are we not——(dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a moment!
The kitchen dissolves in tears, and Tristram explains why in as good a page of criticism as Sterne ever wrote. “There was nothing in the sentence—’twas one of your self-evident truths,” the kind of thing anyone might hear any day. The effect came entirely from the hat. It would have been nothing “if Trim had not trusted more to his hat than his head.” Then, to the reader: “meditate—meditate, I beseech you, upon Trim’s hat.”
It is the Dartmouth prompt, run in reverse. The researchers told their machine that no one was to be described doing anything. Sterne writes the action tag that carries the scene, and puts it in parentheses so that it sits inside the sentence, where it cannot be stripped out without tearing the line. Hand Trim’s words to the instrument and they would land among the commonplaces about mortality, which is just where Tristram says they belong. The hat would not register at all.
Sterne had made the point already, in his first volume. When the parson Yorick dies, his friend Eugenius lays a plain marble slab on his grave with three words on it, “Alas, poor YORICK!” The two pages after it are printed solid black, front and back of a single leaf: an elegy without a word in it.
The paper has its own reason for listening to words alone, and it is a good one. Earlier studies of pink noise between people, the authors note, looked at bodies, at movement and eye contact, rather than at what was said. They turned to meaning because meaning is what people keep: ask someone to recount a conversation, they observe, and few will think to mention a partner’s postural sway. That is true of most people. Tristram, recounting the kitchen, mentions almost nothing but the hat. And on the paper’s own account, the pattern between people was first looked for in the body.
The concession cuts the other way too. The strangers in CANDOR met on video, with faces and gestures; the survey afterwards even asked which of them had smiled more. The instrument set all of that aside and read the words alone, and the words alone were enough to find the pattern. So the lesson of the prompt is not that the hat is idle. It is that the pattern can be written in words alone. Sterne shows what words alone leave out.
VII The Poor Lieutenant
“Reducing conversations to whether they are ‘enjoyable’ can feel bloodless.”Elizabeth Stokoe, London School of Economics, to the Guardian
A few chapters on, the kitchen’s talk turns toward a man Toby once mourned: “Do tell us this story of the poor lieutenant, said Susannah.” The book tells that story a volume later, and Tristram tells it, he says, in his own words. It was some time in the summer of the year in which Dendermond was taken by the allies. Toby is at supper when the landlord of a little inn in the village comes into the parlour to beg a glass or two of sack for a sick gentleman, a poor lieutenant named Le Fever, travelling with his young son. Toby sends Trim to see him, and when Trim comes back the two men talk it over. Their talk is the best in the book:
An’ please your honour, said the corporal, he will never march, but to his grave:
He shall march, cried my uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without advancing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment.
He cannot stand it, said the corporal;
He shall be supported, said my uncle Toby;
He’ll drop at last, said the corporal, and what will become of his boy?
He shall not drop, said my uncle Toby, firmly.
A-well-o’-day,—do what we can for him, said Trim, maintaining his point,—the poor soul will die:
He shall not die, by G—, cried my uncle Toby.
Each turn takes up the one before and pushes it a step: march, stand, supported, drop, die. Neither man gives way, and neither repeats the other. Read as an image rather than a measurement, it has the shape the study describes, a pair holding one subject together while pulling against each other. And the turn with the most in it is Toby’s foot, marching without advancing an inch. Then the oath gets its answer:
The ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.
The book’s most famous sentence erases a word. The next morning Toby is at the bedside. Le Fever “looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby’s face,—then cast a look upon his boy,—and that ligament, fine as it was,—was never broken.” Tristram, telling it, interrupts himself: “shall I go on?——No.”
This is the kind of conversation Elizabeth Stokoe meant. Stokoe, of the London School of Economics, studies recordings of real talk. She welcomed the study’s move away from the idea that more similarity is simply better, but warned against reducing talk to enjoyment. She pointed to a study of a single phone call between a father and his daughter, a young woman with learning disabilities living in residential care, and how long it took them to say goodbye. Many of the conversations that matter most are not ones anyone would call a pleasure. Nobody at that inn enjoyed anything.
The study’s own numbers answer her in part, and it is only fair to say so. Besides the strangers, the team scored 97 conversations between college friends, one Black and one not, about a formative experience the Black friend had lived through, conversations the authors describe as potentially difficult. There the correlations were larger, 0.30 for enjoyment and 0.29 for connection. The samples differ, so the comparison is loose, but in this one sample the measure did not fade when the talk turned serious.
What it cannot hear is narrower than Stokoe’s worry, and older: a foot that marches and goes nowhere, a look up into a face, a tear dropped on an oath, the pauses in a long goodbye, and a narrator who declines his own next turn. Shall I go on? No. When Sterne came to draw his book’s path, he counted the straightest stretch of it as beginning just where that story ends.
VIII A Writing-Master’s Ruler
“a line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler, (borrowed for that purpose)”Tristram Shandy, Volume VI, Chapter 40
The fifth and sixth volumes appeared together in December 1761, with 1762 on the title page. Near the end of the sixth, Tristram reaches the Widow Wadman, with whom Toby is about to fall in love. Rather than describe her, he hands the job to the reader: “paint her to your own mind.” The page that follows is left blank. It is the most literal turn ever handed to a reader, and it comes two chapters before Sterne draws his book’s path.
The fortieth chapter opens with a resolution: “by the help of a vegitable diet, with a few of the cold seeds,” Tristram will go on “in a tolerable straight line.” Then he looks back and draws what he has done so far. Four wandering lines cover the first four volumes, looping back on themselves and doubling in knots. A fifth covers the fifth volume. Its large curves get capital letters: A for a trip to Navarre, B for an airing with the Lady Baussiere and her page, D for the round on which John de la Casse’s devils led him. Its small kinks are dismissed in one phrase, a parson’s joke at the expense of government: “as for c c c c c they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state.”
That fifth line has curves of two sizes, large detours lettered in capitals and small kinks in small letters: loops inside loops, wandering at the scale of a chapter and of a sentence at once. It is a picture, not a measurement, but it is the right kind of picture. The preprint’s methods include its cousin, a figure built from an artificial snippet of talk, in which the two speakers’ separate paths through the space of meanings are drawn as two lines, one red and one blue. It is the same kind of picture, drawn with two pens.
The study’s practice finding is the one Sterne stands on its head. Twenty-five amateur podcasts, each with two hosts, grew more robustly pink over their first fifty episodes, by about 0.09 on the shuffle score, nine per cent of its range. Only shows that reached fifty episodes were counted, so these are the pairs that kept at it. Tristram claims to be improving with practice too. “In this last volume I have done better still,” he says: from “the end of Le Fever’s episode, to the beginning of my uncle Toby’s campaigns,” he has “scarce stepped a yard out of my way.” He goes on: “If I mend at this rate, it is not impossible——by the good leave of his grace of Benevento’s devils——but I may arrive hereafter at the excellency of going on even thus.” The devils are the same ones who led him round the loop marked D. And he rules a straight line with a ruler borrowed from a writing-master, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left.
The hosts’ practice made them pinker. Tristram proposes to improve himself into a ruled line. The joke depends on his having got the direction wrong, and every authority in his world is lined up to approve the line:
This right line,—the path-way for Christians to walk in! say divines——The emblem of moral rectitude! says Cicero——The best line! say cabbage-planters——is the shortest line, says Archimedes, which can be drawn from one given point to another.
Cicero, who gave conversation its rule of turns, is here handed the ruler. The chapter ends on a question. Tristram asks the reader, “Pray can you tell me,—that is, without anger, before I write my chapter upon straight lines——” how it is that “your men of wit and genius have all along confounded this line, with the line of GRAVITATION.”
He never wrote the chapter upon straight lines, and he never kept to the ruled line either. Three years later, in the seventh volume, Tristram fled Death across France. Gravitation is the right word to end on. In the first volume the parson Yorick wages open war on gravity, which he defines, after a French wit, as “A mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.” The ruled line is the solemn line, and Sterne, who was on Yorick’s side, puts it off until “hereafter.”
IX The Logical Form of That
“What is the logical form of that?”Piero Sraffa to Ludwig Wittgenstein, as told by Norman Malcolm
One of the great arguments of twentieth-century philosophy is said to have been unsettled by a turn with no words in it. After Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, he argued for years with the Italian economist Piero Sraffa over the ideas of his first book, the Tractatus, whose central idea was that a proposition is a kind of picture of the fact it describes, and must share that fact’s logical form. Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein’s student and friend, had the story from Wittgenstein himself. One day, as the two men were riding together (on a train, Malcolm thought), Wittgenstein was insisting on the point. Sraffa answered with a gesture Neapolitans use to signal something like disgust or contempt: he brushed the underside of his chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips. Then he asked what the logical form of that was. In Malcolm’s account, that was what loosened Wittgenstein’s grip on the idea that a proposition must literally picture what it describes.
Wittgenstein told it, Malcolm says, to several other people as well. It has the polish of much retelling, and it fits almost too well. Malcolm hedged even the train, and in a footnote he adds that Georg Henrik von Wright heard a different version from Wittgenstein, in which the question was about “grammar,” not logical form. But even polished, it shows the shape: a pair, an argument kept up over years, and a gesture that did what no proposition could. The philosophy Wittgenstein went on to write, published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations, found the meaning of words in their use in the business of living. In its preface he thanked Sraffa for years of criticism of his thinking, and traced the book’s most important ideas to it.
Models like MPNet learn what sentences mean, or something like it, from how sentences are used: roughly the later Wittgenstein’s thought, set to work by machine. The gesture that changed his mind is the one thing such a model cannot see. Sraffa’s chin and Trim’s hat belong to the same order of things: each carries a turn’s whole meaning, and neither leaves anything in a transcript.
So there are four shapes in the book, not three. There is white, the conversation that lurches from turn to turn and carries nothing across: Walter and Toby in the parlour, as far as words go. There is drift, the rut, where talk settles into one way of going on and stays there: Toby on his way back to the ravelins. There is the ruled line, the parrot’s line, the one shape that every authority approves and no conversation survives: Mrs. Shandy in the bed, and the line Tristram promises for “hereafter.” And there is the shape between, which wanders off and comes back at every scale: Toby and Trim over the poor lieutenant, and Tristram and his reader over nine volumes, strangers who were promised friendship and got it. These are images, not measurements. In the study’s terms the colours belong mostly to pairs, and so they do in Sterne’s.
Written talk comes in three kinds. There is transcribed speech, which keeps the words and their order and nothing else, and in which, as the Dartmouth instrument shows, something real can still be heard. There are real exchanges carried on in writing, letters and messages, where the words are all there is. And there is composed dialogue, far older than the novel: the dialogues of Plato and Lucian, Erasmus’s Colloquies, printed plays with their stage directions. What the novel mostly added was a narrator standing inside the scene, who could tell you about the pipe on the hand, the tear on the oath and the hat on the ground.
Models like the one that wrote the Dartmouth dialogues are trained on text that presumably holds all three kinds. Asked for good conversation with the stage directions forbidden, this one still wrote pink. Somewhere in what it read is its teacher. Did it learn the rhythm from talk, or from talk written down, hat and all?
The ninth and last volume of Tristram Shandy came out in January 1767, and Sterne died fourteen months later in lodgings in Old Bond Street. The book began with a question from Mrs. Shandy, about the clock, and it ends with another. The household is gathered, arguing over the reputation of Walter’s bull, when she, who so often agrees, asks what it is all about. The last turn goes to Yorick, and it is two sentences, the second one unasked for:
L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about?——A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.
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Sources: Kathryn C. O’Nell, Kiara L. Sanchez and Emily S. Finn, “Pink noise in dyads’ semantic similarity trajectories predicts conversation enjoyment,” Science Advances, November 6, 2026, and the authors’ preprint, “Complex mutual adaptation in dyads’ semantic similarity trajectories predicts conversation success” (2025), the source of every figure quoted here and of the prompt, dialogue and podcast methods; the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s news release, November 6, 2026, which confirms the published paper’s findings but gives no figures; Ian Sample’s report in the Guardian, November 6, 2026, linked here in its AOL syndication, with Elizabeth Stokoe’s remarks. On the corpus: Andrew Reece and colleagues, “The CANDOR corpus: Insights from a large multimodal dataset of naturalistic conversation,” Science Advances 9 (2023). On pink noise in music and speech: Richard F. Voss and John Clarke, “‘1/f noise’ in music: Music from 1/f noise,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 63, no. 1 (1978). On Sterne: Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), quoted from Masaru Uchida’s transcription at Gifu University, which follows the third edition (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760) for Volumes I–II and the first editions for Volumes III–IX; the Laurence Sterne Trust, “Key dates.” Cicero, De Officiis I.134, translated by Walter Miller (1913); Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Cicero, Ad Familiares IV.5; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, fourth edition (1700), “Of the Association of Ideas.” On Sraffa and Wittgenstein: Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), including his footnote on von Wright’s version; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Preface. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; cold read by Claude Fable 5.2. The dialogues in the Dartmouth study were written by an earlier Claude model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The header and the image in Section VII were generated with Gemini Argon.