In "Joyas Voldares" by Brian Doyle, Doyle starts off the essay by saying "Consider the humming bird for a long moment" (Doyle 64), because he starts off the essay this way it feels like Doyle is forcing you to take your time while reading the paper and not to rush through it making sure that you do not miss the message that he is trying to get across, which is that you never know what is truly inside a persons' heart. After that first line he begins to talk about humming birds and how the humming bird has a heart the size of a pencil eraser but is in fact one of the strongest heart on earth, strong than a human heart, "Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles-anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight" (Doyle 65). The job of a heart in any animal is to provide them with life and give them the ability to experience of living and what it means to exist in this world. Because the heart gives life to every animal on Earth it can also take it away, in the text we are given the image of a humming bird flying for 500 miles only to stop for food and end up dying because of the colder weather and/or lack of food. The idea of a beating heart is repeated multiple times in the text especially referring to the life span of an animal, Doyle states that "Every creature has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime" (Doyle 65). What he means by that is don't let your beats go to waste fill them with memories, emotions, and knowledge, and don't take your beats for granted use them, you can be a tortoise using them slowly but living a long life or you can use them like a humming bird, pushing yourself every day and live a short but energetic life. It's all about how you want to live your life. As the paper changes direction Doyle begins to talk about the largest heart known to man kind, the blue whale, and how after this monstrous creature hits puberty it drops off the face of the earth, its ironic how we know so much about their heart and the size of it, but yet so little about the rest of their lives. This can be related to human life, we know so much about the human heart and how it works but we will never truly know what goes on inside a persons' heart, what they're truly feeling and what they want to do with their life. It is a very similar case with the blue whale we know how their heart works, how big it is, but we don't know what goes on inside their heart and what their heart has been through. It is the same with all creatures we know how their hearts work but we don't know what happens inside them, in most cases we don't know if they can feel emotions or not, in the text Doyle makes a reference to what happens inside of every living creature, he says "No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside." (Doyle 66). We can interpret this in two different ways, the first is very literal that we all have some sort of liquid inside of us and that is what keeps us alive and apart of the world that we live in or are apart of. The second is more of a conceptual interpretation of how we all have something going on inside of us, the "churn" aspect of the quote, we all have problems that we deal with no matter what or who we are, from the smallest organism to the largest blue whale, we have issues and internal struggles that we encounter on a day to day basis (More on the Heart). The last paragraph is one of the most powerful pieces of writing that I have read in my life. Doyle goes from an entire essay written off of facts and his own interpretation of the hearts of animals to what the heart means emotionally. He says "So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment." (Doyle 66). Of all the facts Doyle used in this essay I believe that this one is the most accurate, no one can measure the capacity of a heart and this is exactly what Doyle is saying, you don't know how much someone has inside their heart, everyone's heart is different the all have a different life different memories, experiences and only the person knows what's in there and the true capacity of their own heart. He precedes to talk about how we try to open up our heart to people we care about but in the end we are all alone, and that's what we are afraid of is being alone which is why we open up to the ones who mean the most to us, so we don't have to be alone. "When we are young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all the hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore," (Doyle 66), there will never be another person who will be there for you all the time not matter what the only person that will be there for you in the toughest of times is yourself, the way we think when we are younger is that you will always have someone there for you but, that is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, because deep down inside we know that it's not true, there will be times that someone is in fact there for you but in reality they will not always be there for you, once we are old we realize that we are the only ones who can repair our hearts and we are the only ones who truly understand what our life has meant, and how we have repaired all of the scares and bruises, tears that our heart has suffered throughout our life, and how we are still shaken up by these injuries but over the years we have learned how to deal with them and how we let them help us in our everyday lives. At the end of the essay Doyle uses strong imagery to show how some people try to build brick walls around their hearts but "no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and and as tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can but down in comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children." (Doyle 66). When you read into this you can help but take a good long hard look at yourself and think if you are guilty of doing just that, when Mr. Doyle wrote this essay it was never about the humming birds or the blue whales, it was always about the heart and how we can study the mechanics of how it works, but we will never know what is inside, for what a single heart can contain is truly endless, and only you will ever know what is inside yours.

