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Sat 03 Mar 2007A master of the metaphorEthics:'The problem with modern life," writes Terry Eagleton, "is that there is too much meaning as well as too little." It's a problem the critic and Marxist literary theorist has long embodied in his own prose: just as his writing bristles with surprising similes, you sense that Eagleton is not saying anything very startling after all.He's addicted to metaphor at the expense of logic; metaphysical wit stands in for an argument as such. Nothing is ever precisely itself: it is always, instead, somewhat "like" some out-of-the-way image from the Eagletonian repertoire of comic comparisons. Postmodernists are like tortoises (they don't ask existential questions); anti-Heideggerians are like warthogs (unconcerned about death); "what is the meaning of life?" might make as much sense as "what is the taste of geometry"?