In Thomas Maho's book, Metaphors of Death: On the Logic of Transcendent Experience (1987), one of the eternal questions about the "last things" of human life—dying and death—is placed within a dense network of metaphorical understandings of the situation of nonexistence. Philosophical, social, medical, religious, ethnographic, and esoteric discourses, sometimes intertwined, sometimes entering into insurmountable contradictions, outline a vast field of reflection on the fact, meaning, or nonsense of death, on the very possibility of speaking about the incomprehensible.