At a certain point, human life becomes uninteresting to men. What then? They turn to some universal.
The greatest material mother of us all is the sea.
Dana's eyes failed him when he was studying at Harvard. And suddenly, he turned to the sea, the naked Mother. He went to sea as a common sailor before the mast.
You can't idealize brute labour. Yet you can. You can go through with brute labour, and know what it means. You can even meet and match the sea, and KNOW her.
This is what Dana wanted: a naked fighting experience with the sea.
KNOW THYSELF. That means, know the earth that is in your blood. Know the sea that is in your blood. The great elementals.
But we must repeat: KNOWING and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states. The more you know, exactly, the less you are. The more you are, in being, the less you know.
This is the great cross of man, his dualism. The blood-self, and the nerve-brain self.
Knowing, then, is the slow death of being. Man has his epochs of being, his epochs of knowing. It will always be a great oscillation. The goal is to know how not-to-know.
Dana took another great step in knowing: knowing the mother sea. But it was a step also in his own undoing. It was a new phase of dissolution of his own being. Afterwards, he would be a less human thing. He would be a knower: but more near to mechanism than before. That is our cross, our doom.