So much goes on in this city. Somewhere among its millions of people someone is sitting in a four-foot-square box and thinking about an older city, thinking, "They build a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization." He is shaking his head at his own predicament and laughing to himself. Someone else is walking toward a theatre, a concert hall, with the cadence of Neruda's letter in her head, and a joke from the man from the oldest city in the world. Somehow she is comforted by this joke, somehow it helps her make it across the street and into the concert hall, it makes her walk to the podium and read Neruda's letter with all the more certainty that there's a country with an old city and a letter.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 110)