“’Tis not too late to seek a newer world”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North“’Tis not too late to seek a newer world” is a line from Ulysses that Dorrigo Evans reads and rereads while trying to find his way out of fear and toward a renewed sense of possibility. In the passage, its promise is neither uncomplicated optimism nor a claim that the past can be undone: the line matters because Dorrigo clutches at light while living with the effects of an experience that has made the world feel enclosing.
The line within Ulysses
The expression appears as part of a verse passage that moves from the waning day and climbing moon to a world that “Moans round with many voices,” before arriving at the invitation, “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” The movement gives the line its force. It does not deny darkness or pain; the appeal to seek something new follows them. The summons is directed to companions—“Come, my friends”—so the prospect of renewal is voiced as a shared undertaking rather than a solitary triumph.
Dorrigo’s repeated reading gives the passage a role beyond literary quotation. He reads and rereads Ulysses, and the quoted lines are embedded in that repetition. The return to the text suggests an effort to hold onto a possible future when ordinary surroundings have become difficult to bear. The line’s “not too late” offers a limited but persistent opening: time has passed, and suffering is present, yet the possibility of seeking remains.
Fear, repetition, and the search for light
The passage places this reading against Dorrigo’s fear of enclosed spaces, crowds, trams, trains, and dances—things that press him inward and cut out the light. He has trouble breathing, and he hears a woman calling him in his dreams. When she calls, he does not go. The refusal and the recurring reading sit beside one another: the dream presents a call he cannot answer, while the verse preserves an invitation to continue seeking.
The line also belongs to a larger sequence of effort and ascent. Dorrigo nearly fails his exams, plays football again, and searches for light in a progression that carries him toward becoming captain, doctor, and surgeon. The movement upward is not presented as a clean cure for fear; the repeated reading and the continuing distress remain part of the same account. The expression therefore marks aspiration under pressure, not proof that the pressure has vanished.
Memory, love, and the line’s limits
That sequence reaches from Dorrigo’s search for light to the image of him lying in a hotel bed with Amy, watching the moon rise over the valley of her belly. The moon links this remembered intimacy with the verse’s climbing moon, but the passage does not make renewal simply equivalent to romance. Instead, the remembered scene gives the search for a newer world a concrete human point of reference, while the poem’s invitation retains its broader emphasis on continuing onward.
After the repeated reading, Dorrigo looks back at Amy and says, “They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew.” The line’s place beside this recollection gives its hope a tender, retrospective resonance, without making the past itself recoverable. Its importance lies in the tension between what Dorrigo has endured and what he still tries to reach: a newer world is not guaranteed, but it has not become impossible to seek.
