Bricks and mortar Berlin has become a kind of network across which visitors and residents interact as if on some sort of comfortable global platform.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change.

Berlin inspired Bowie and stirred him to write about real, important matters.

Eight months after graduating from Ryerson, there I was in West Berlin working with Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie and Kim Novak.

To me, Berlin is as much a conceit as a reality. Why? Because the city is forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so lives more powerfully in the imagination.

Since the summer days of my Canadian childhood, I have loved to canoe across the dark mirror of northern lakes, paddling with an inside flick of the blade, leaving a trail of twisting whirlpools in my wake.