Opening paragraphs.......................

"I vividly remember when the mystery of existence first swam into my ken.  It was in the early 1970s.  I was  a callow and would-be rebellious high-school student in rural Virginia.  As callow and would-be rebellious high-school students sometimes do, I had begun to develop an interest in existentialism, a philosophy that seemed to hold out hope for resolving my adolescent insecurities, or at least elevating them to a grander plain.  One day I went to the local college library and checked out some impressive-looking tomes:  Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heidegger's Introduction to  Metaphysics.  It was in the opening pages of the latter book, with its promising title, that I was first confronted by the question Why is there something rather than nothing at all?  I can still recall being bowled over by its starkness, its purity, it sheer power.  Here was the super-ultimate question, the one that loomed behind all the others that mankind had ever asked.  Where, I wondered, had it been all my (admittedly brief) intellectual life?"
-Jim Holt,  Why Does The World Exist?