Introduction

Beginning as one always does in the middle,in mediis rebus, one experiences a sense of disorientation, a sort of cartographic anxiety or spatial perplexity that appears to be part of our fundamental being-in-the-world. It is an experience not unlike that of Dante, in the opening lines of his Commedia:

Midway along the journey of our life,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path.

(Dante 1984: 67)