[ “What do you believe, then?” I countered.
“I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly. “It is like
yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?” ]
{Jack London, The sea-wolf}

One of the first books I've read during children's years. One of the first ways to look at life in its harshness, in its pure and brute and overwhelming and terrifying force. It took some time until it came to my mind that this reading of the great mystery of life is also a very particular way of reading its beauty: Life does not surrender, neglecting its finiteness until its end, and life makes you know about its very own irony, makes you able to laugh at it, yet it does neither allow to overcome itself nor resolve some kind of solution from infiniteness, just like dividing by zero. In famous words: Man can be destroyed but not defeated, to quote the Old Man and the Sea. There is no such thing as unbearability - there isn't even a word for it - as you can still bear it. Life in its beauty and its terror is simple: being alive as a present, and being alive as an unconditional duty.