Glass often employed language in semantically ambiguous ways and incorporated visual elements as essential features of his stage works. This echoed the philosophy of stage director Antonin Artaud, who asserted that Western literary theater had reached a dead end and that playwrights should return to emphasizing images. This “anti-literary” viewpoint paralleled the ideas of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, with his conception that language and pictures do not summon the same consciousness and that neither can be reduced to the other’s terms. Glass incorporated these ideas into many of his works, including early stage works. His collaboration with Robert Wilson in Einstein on the Beach minimizes the use of language and relies heavily on visual impressions. In Satyagraha, Glass used Sanskrit for some of the text to encourage audience members to focus their attention on elements other than text within the opera. In Glass’s stage work The Sound of a Voice (2003), a Japanese soldier visits a woman who has not seen another human being for a long time. She confesses: “Anything you say I will enjoy hearing. It’s not even the words. It’s the sound of a voice, the way it moves through the air.”