Pi describes the vast variety of skies and seas that pass over and around the lifeboat, from blistering blue calm to black, rain-spitting storms, and from roaring waves to dead silence. The constant changes in weather and water become the shifting backdrop of his days.

Pi explains that being a castaway means always standing at the centre of an unchanging circle: wherever he looks, the horizon forms an immense circumference and his gaze becomes a radius. The sun overwhelms him with harsh exposure, while the moon emphasizes his loneliness, making him wonder if somewhere else another castaway is trapped in the same geometry.

Pi reflects on the exhausting opposites that define survival at sea: light and dark, heat and cold, thirst and drowning rain, feast and starvation, calm and suffocating fear during rough weather. Even blessings carry costs—sun helps dry provisions and power the solar stills but scorches him; rain replenishes water but threatens stored food with spoilage and triggers fear that it might be the last rainfall.

The most punishing emotional swing is between boredom and terror. Pi notes how stillness can breed apathy and breakdown, while storms whip him into frenzy, and how each state contains traces of the other.

Pi concludes that death is the only constant source of intense feeling, whether imagined in calm or confronted in danger. Life on a lifeboat is stripped down like an endgame in chess—few pieces, highest stakes—and it is both physically arduous and morally corrosive; to endure, Pi learns to discard what he can and seize small moments of happiness, even the “luck” of finding a tiny dead fish at his feet.