Tuesday, I hit the Great Ocean Road, which hugs the coast west of Melbourne towards Adelaide. The bus tour was pleasant enough, but things turned really spectactular at the end, when we hit the stretch the 12 Apostles and London Bridge. You kind of forget everything else when you hit the stretch between those big boys.
The 12 Apostles
London Bridge
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“Originally home meant the center of the world not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be “founded.” A home was established, as he says, “at the heart of the real.” In traditional societies everything that made sense of the world was real: but the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was “unreal.” Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation. Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards in the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads that led arcross the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. The crossing of the two lines, the reassurance their intersection promise, was probably already there, in embryo, in the thinking and belief of nomadic people, but they carried the vertical line with them as they might carry a tent pole.”
-John Berger, “And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” (New York 1984), qtd. in Franco La Cecla, “Getting lost and the localized mind,” trans. Stuart Wylen, in Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday, ed. Alan Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 38.
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