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In the morning I find Vancouver necessarily smaller, less splendid than my epic creation, but not unlike it. The main difference was that I had overlooked Vancouver's right to be in any way historical; it had to be synchronic. My first
thought was: Hong Kong in the sixties as in photographs by the Magnum photographer, Leung; there was still late nineteenth century Chicago-style mercantile nineteenth century architecture along the waterfront; and I am interested to find myself wishing that those buildings could be torn down and replaced with the glossy architecture of Central waterfront in Hong Kong.
They won't be, of course; they will be transformed into the Old Waterfront Museum and Oyster Parlour etc. And it would be very puritanical, Corbusian of me to think that this wasn't the right thing to do.

But it is splendid, the quay, with big cruisers drawn up and seaplanes flitting about like waterboatmen and big snowy mountains in the distance and the very considerable range of modest (30/40 storey skyscrapers, condominiums all of a style very much their own, "style Vancouver", for, to insist once again, the vernacular and local variations of bimillennium world architecture are there to be discerned, though they may not yet immediately recognised. On the plane to Vancouver from New York I saw the Hollywood modernisation of Great Expectations. Dickens is my city companion. The effect that this film had on me was to make me think only how great, how universal and alas how limited Dickens was! And that I had immediately to read Great Expectations again. I bought it and set to. I recalled reading Martin Chuzzlewit in a little room in Jakarta, in the intense heat of the afternoon the pages blowing in the airstream of a noisy fan and the call to prayer coming from the mosques outside. The contrast was dramatic: the dankness of London and the shut out brilliant light of Jakarta, itself so Dickensian in its contrasts. Great Expectations lasted me through Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile and…Mexico City

I arrive here at dusk. Or is it dusk? In fact the next day I discover in the paper that I have arrived on the worst day of the city's environmental history, which is saying a great deal.. Even I notice that the atmosphere is a little polluted.
(For I am like the Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Costner has gills, having adapted Darwinianly to the new conditions of the planet. Likewise I seem immune to extremes of exhaust, pollution. I really don't notice it. Long time in cities pent, and willingly pent, enthusiastically pent and I seem to have made the same kind of adaptation.)

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