The ocean is the planet's unconscious — vast, ungovernable, the source of all life and the destination of all rivers — and every civilization that has lived beside it has developed a mythology proportional to its power. Every one of those mythologies involves a kind of humility that landlocked philosophies sometimes lack. To stand at the edge of the sea is to understand, in the body if not yet in the mind, that you are not the largest thing.
Each step builds on the last.