| Sunday, 05 October 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
I hope you’ve been enjoying the little run of holidays we’ve had this last week (except for that pesky little working Friday I’m sure many of you managed to sidestep anyway). Rohin is on leave for a few days, so we don’t have a lede section in this week’s edition of First Principles. But we do have some off-the-beat, thought-provoking book recommendations and many lovely pictures for you to flip through.
So, without further ado, here’s Tanim with your books for the week.
The thing with literary drownings
Hi, what are your thoughts on drowning?
I’m not being morbid for the sake of it, let me assure you. But it’s a powerful and recurring motif in literature; a paradoxical instance that lends itself well to the exploration of intensely emotional subjects and experiences. After all, drowning is the end of life brought about by the very entity that sustains it.
The way authors use drownings often extends beyond mere physical death and into the realm of symbolism—of hidden struggles, repressed emotions, and often overwhelming circumstances. The protagonist (and with them the reader) is consumed not just by water, but by the weight of their own silent turmoil. It can also be a bit escapist, like in the common expression “to drown one’s sorrows”.
A common thread in all of this is the failure to openly address one’s inner world—a silent suffocation by what remains unspoken.
My first literary memory of drowning is Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Her death is described not as a violent struggle, but as a serene and passive surrender.
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued unto
that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Shakespeare never gets old, no matter how many times I read his work.
Here’s another excerpt from a creative nonfiction book called The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger.
The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is, he doesn’t inhale until he’s on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point there’s so much carbon dioxide in the blood, and so little oxygen, that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he’s underwater or not. That is called the “break point”; laboratory experiments have shown the break point to come after eighty-seven seconds. It’s a sort of neurological optimism, as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in.
To be honest, I got sucked into this rather unsettling rabbithole this week because our reader Sunaina sent in a recommendation for the critically acclaimed The Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese. Drowning, with all its symbolisms and metaphors, is a central theme of this book.
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