the oceans are on the outside

teskey says that to mediterranean minds the sea is - precisely - encircled by land (think "地中海" in chinese) but the portuguese turned their sense of the world inside out by showing that no, it's the oceans that are on the outside, and we are the ones enclosed. milton thought geography was more important than anthropology, camoens, on the other hand, liked people better. in camoens we are uninterested in the cosmos - we have nothing else but the world, this earth that we live on, and the people in it - there are no heavens to look to, and no hell to fall into, and instead of that making us all diminutive, it's incredibly uplifting and ennobling.