Robinson is a former teacher of English literature and creative writing and, as of 2006, is a full-time writer and editor. In the following essay, Robinson explores how the problem of finding truth in a world dedicated to avoiding it is examined in John Edgar Wideman's “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence.”

John Edgar Wideman took the title of his story, “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence,” from the last line of a work by an Austrian philosopher: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). A possible interpretation of Wittgenstein's sentence and the argument that leads up to it is that the essence of the world is beyond the reach of human thought and words. Words can describe known facts about the world, but that is all. Among the many things that lie beyond words are ethics, aesthetics, the...