 The human experience is something so unique. While it mirrors the experience of other species, the human experience is something totally unique to us. Ups and downs, hills and ditches; the road is full of obstacles. While it’s sad and tragic, the experience is also exciting and wonderful. We are simultaneously very strong and extremely fragile; hard-hearted as well as caring. The human experience is something tragic and beautiful. These are the ideas that Doyle tries to portray in the essay. In Brain Doyle’s Joyas Volardores there are many instances of metaphors that illustrate the human experience. 

He uses the hummingbird and its heart to illustrate the human experience. Doyle explains that hummingbirds and their hearts are thin and fragile. Their hearts are thinner than ours. They are built to take in more oxygen at a fast rate. They are built to go fast and to search for food. The price for living quickly is they live closer to death (The Carolina Reader, pg. 95). In this passage, Doyle is explaining the life of a humming bird and how fragile it’s heart is, but in reality it’s a metaphor for the human experience. Doyle makes this connection in the latter part of the paragraph. “You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine” (The Carolina Reader, pg. 95). Doyle uses the word “you” to address the reader. When he uses “you”, he is saying that the idea he was talking about in the paragraph applies to us as well. Many people live ambitiously and burn out quickly just like the hummingbirds do. They don’t have to. It’s not the way they are built. Doyle tells us that animals have so many heart beats that they can use while they are alive and it all depends on how we use them (The Carolina Reader, pg. 95). The hummingbird uses them quickly and they die out fast. While others like the blue whale use them more slowly and live longer. This is the same with humans. We can choose how we use our heart beats we can live life ambitiously and live a shorter life or we can live life slowly and live longer. It’s all up to us, but this is the metaphor that Doyle creates.

Doyle uses the blue whale and its heart to explain the human experience as well. The blue whales can be seen as the opposite spectrum from the humming bird. They live life slowly and carefully. “The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers” (The Carolina Reader, pg. 95). They also have hearts that are a lot stronger than that of the hummingbird. They don’t have to live as fast as the hummingbirds do they can afford to have a large heart. Even though they have huge hearts and are very strong animals they are very fragile at the same time but in a different way than the hummingbirds are. Doyle explains that the whales will travel with another blue whale and that their cry is so loud that it can be heard from miles away (The Carolina Reader, pg. 95-96). They have to travel with a partner and their cries can be heard. That is what makes them fragile. They are fragile socially. They depend on others. This is a mirror of humans. We can be strong and hardy. Many people will harden themselves to the world and try to cut themselves off from society, but no matter how hard they try they will be broken. “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath” (The Carolina Reader, pg. 96). No matter how hard they try they will always be affected by society. We are meant to be social. This is just a part of the human experience its unavoidable. We must all endure it. The whales are a perfect metaphor for human life. 

Doyle uses the last paragraph to sum up and to summarize the human experience as a whole. He wants to clearly show us that this was the main point of the essay all along. It’s his thesis. The human experience is a hard road. We want to be open to everyone and accept them but we can’t. “We open windows to each other, but live alone in the house of the heart” (The Carolina Reader, pg. 96). In this paragraph he still uses a metaphor, but this time it’s not an animal. He uses the house as a metaphor. In the quote he says that we are “alone in the house of the heart” (The Carolina Reader, pg. 96). Using the house as a metaphor for the heart. He says that we open windows to others. Windows are generally not used to enter the house but solely to look inside or outside. So we are not truly opening our heart to people and letting them in we are only showing them what is inside and we aren’t really coming out. We are just looking out from the inside. The reason we don’t open up is because of experience. “When young we think there will come one person who will savor us always; when we are older we know that this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will” (The Carolina Reader, pg. 96). From experience we realize that the world isn’t perfect and that people will hurt us. Doyle explains that once we are old we realize that the world is cruel and we don’t open our hearts to people anymore because our heart has already been bruised and broken. In the latter part of the paragraph Doyle tells us that we can try to fortify our hearts like a house is fortified with bricks as much as we want, but regardless we will be broken (The Carolina Reader, pg. 96). We will always be bruised and destroyed. It’s unavoidable. It’s because the hardship and difficulties are part of the human experience. It really is something beautiful.

The metaphors in “Joyas Volardores” are the perfect way to illustrate the human experience. They show that there are a lot of similarities between other species and us, but they don’t have the same experience that we do. Because we are able to perceive emotion and think critically we differ from the other species and can experience situations differently. Their experience is that of instinct while ours is made of emotion and thought. This could either make us the best species because we can perceive things differently or the worst because people aren’t good and they ruin the world. Some may say that it would be better to just be instinctual because we don’t have to experience the tragedy of the human experience.  
