What an awesome beginning to a book!

"Not darknessss, for that implies an understanding of light.
   Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.
   Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.
   But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn't exist at all: awareness.
Nothing more than that. Just awareness--a vague, ethereal sense of being.
   Being...but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future--only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception..."

http://www.amazon.com/WWW-Wake-Robert-J-Sawyer/dp/0441016790