“I am a part of all that I have met”

“I am a part of all that I have met” is a line Dorrigo Evans recites in a conversation with Lynette Maison. It gives words to the way a life can be formed by its encounters, but the scene also exposes a painful contradiction: Dorrigo can recall poetry and feel shaped by what he has lived, yet cannot remember the faces of the dead he wants others to remember.

The Line in Conversation

Dorrigo recites the line among references to Kipling, Browning and Tennyson. Lynette Maison, running a hand down his withered thigh, challenges him: “You made that up, she said.” He insists that he did not, and calls the line apposite. The exchange makes the phrase more than a literary ornament: it becomes a claim about the relation between a person and the lives encountered along the way.

Lynette immediately tests that claim against Dorrigo himself. He can recite the line, and much else besides, but cannot remember a man’s face. His brief admission, “No,” turns the confident breadth of the verse into an intimate measure of what memory has failed to preserve. The contrast is especially sharp because the words gather experience into a whole, while Dorrigo’s recollection of particular people remains incomplete.

A Life Made by Encounters

At seventy-seven, Dorrigo is still trying to understand what his nature has made of his life. The fearlessness and impatience with convention that led him to help others in the camps also carried him into an affair with Lynette Maison, the wife of his colleague Rick Maison, and into other relationships. The line’s expansive idea of belonging to all one has met therefore sits beside a history in which his encounters include acts of care, betrayal and self-deception.

Dorrigo is writing a foreword and hopes to use it, without unnecessary revelation, to correct the attention fixed on himself. He wants to restore his place to that of a doctor and bring the forgotten into rightful memory by focusing on them rather than on his own fame. The words about being part of what he has met resonate with that effort: his life is not his alone, and the people who shaped it should not disappear behind his public image.

Memory and Its Contradiction

The phrase does not resolve Dorrigo’s difficulty. He fears that even an attempt at humility and correction may rebound to his advantage, enlarging the public regard he considers a failure of perception. His face is everywhere, he thinks, but he can no longer see the faces of the dead. The line’s broad claim of connection thus meets the narrow, devastating limit of his memory.

In the scene with Lynette, poetry remains available to Dorrigo when faces do not. Shelley and Shakespeare come to him unbidden, and he reflects on how a life can seem contained in a book, a sentence, or a few words. “I am a part of all that I have met” belongs to this pattern of recitation, but its force comes from the gap between verbal remembrance and personal recollection: Dorrigo can carry the words of others while struggling to recover the people whose lives he wants his writing to honor.