 Humans and animals have a lot in common. We both live and die. Animals and humans also both have hearts that keep them alive. While our experiences are very similar, the human experience is so unique. We alone are capable of thought and reason. We can think critically while animals are simply bound to instinct. Even though we have this higher cognitive function, it is a curse. Life is difficult because of our ability to think. 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 emotional. We long to have a soulmate, but some die alone. These are the ideas that Doyle tries to portray in his essay, Joyas Volardores, where he uses many instances of metaphors to illustrate the human experience. 

By explaining that hummingbirds and their hearts are thin and fragile, Doyle illustrates the human experience. According to Doyle, hummingbird’s 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 (95).  In this passage, Doyle is explaining the life of a humming bird and how fragile it’s heart is, but it’s a metaphor for the human experience. Just like the human counterpart people who live fast lives use up their heart beats and end up with heart attacks or death.  “You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine” (Doyle 95). He 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 (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 on the opposite spectrum from the humming bird. They live life slowly and carefully. They also have hearts that are a lot stronger than that of the hummingbird.  Even though they have huge hearts and are very strong animals they are very fragile at the same time. 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 (95-96).  The social connection is what makes them fragile. They depend on each other. 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” (Doyle 96). No matter how harden a human heart becomes something in life change them. We are meant to be social. This is just a part of the human experience. 

Doyle uses the last paragraph to summarize the human heart experience as a whole. Doyle writes that 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” (96). In this paragraph, he still uses a metaphor, but this time it’s not an animal. He uses the house as a metaphor for the heart. When he says that we open windows to others he means that 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 our experience of the world and hardship. “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” (Doyle 96). From experience, we realize that the world isn’t perfect and that people will hurt us. We realize that we can’t be as open as we once were. 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 (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.

Even though there are differences in the hearts of hummingbirds, whales, and many other species, there is still something that ties living beings together. According to Doyle, all of us having something inside us that moves within us (96). It keeps us alive. It is what makes us living beings.

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 have the capacity to do evil.
