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)

Introduction : Spatiality .
Robert T. Tally Jr.
the New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2013