




Life itself has puzzled all of mankind for centuries upon centuries, yet no one has an answer. We strive to understand what we can through far stretched theories and scientific equations but who’s to say whether we are correct or not. We will never be guaranteed an answer but through the workings of a hummingbird's heart and the veins of a whale. Brian Doyle writes us his theory that the act of living life can be so complex that it takes your breath away, but also as simplistic as knowing what the creases of your lovers hands feel like touching yours. What Doyle says we are at the end of our days is that we are so much smaller than we think we are, what we hold in our hearts projects our outlook on life and in the end we are nothing but that we can’t dwell on this fact. What we create here and think up there and build in another place can all be lost within a blink of an eye. 

I  wondered why it is that he goes into such great detail about these animals when superficially they have nothing in common but reading more closely, he makes the hummingbird seem absolutely magnificent and great though they don’t even weigh an ounce.  “...More than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nines times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.” (Doyle 94)  He’s saying here that though their tiny bodies are capable of doing amazing things it is hard for us to understand because we think that such a tiny creature is insignificant. We think of ourselves as the big and we are the only important ones, but this isn’t true at all. He later mentions the whale as huge. Big enough for a child to walk through it’s veins but “of the largest animal who ever lived, we know nothing about.” (Doyle 95) It doesn’t matter how big we are in this world, we could be the biggest creatures who walked this planet but when you take us all out of the picture and look at us individually, we are extraordinarily small. So why is it that size is mentioned about these two obviously different sized species? I believe it is to further delve into the idea that here on Earth, our perspective of every animal, thing, or creature is a specific size compared to our relation to it and we all believe this size matters. Though a hummingbird's size can’t compare to humans and the size of a human compares nothing to a whale, we have to look deeper than just the sheer physical size of us. While looking at this whole life in general, our galaxy, our cosmic universe, we are smaller than a pin dot.

Earth is constantly moving and “we open windows to each” but in the end Doyle tells us “we live alone in the house of the heart” (Doyle 95) .We are alone in this life. We surround ourselves with distractions as other people but in the end, the only one we have is ourselves. As we  go about life, we meet new people and start new relationships and fall in love, we are expected to do this. But Doyle explains that though we have these connections, “We are utterly open and with no one in the end-,” but he says that “perhaps we must” live like this, swallowed by our feelings and kept trapped in our hearts because as humans, we need to feel. (Doyle 95) Once we take us out and put ourselves under a microscope, there are so many other important things surrounding us. We thirst for every feeling in the world, whether it be bad or good. I think that he tells us whatever things we keep bottled up inside of us, will be what we see when we look at things throughout our lifetime. We choose to see the good or we choose to see the bad, but whatever we keep, we cannot let it blind us and make us bitter. 

As time goes on, we encounter things that can build us up into the best person we could be, or just the opposite. Things break us easily and it is because we hold what we love in the same places as what we fear and hate. Anxiety is in the same place as hope. Love in the same place as hate. It all is associated with our hearts. Doyle tells us this when he says “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it all come in an instant.” (Doyle 96) We are all so fragile and looking at our existence from a greater distance, we know that this fragility comes with living and having filled hearts that so easily can be broken, shows us just how what we feel can change one’s opinion and outlook on their entire life. We keep so much in our hearts because that’s what we do. It’s how we cope, how we live, and how we survive. 

Brian Doyle chooses his words so perfectly to convey his meaning of what life is and how we live it; he shines light over our weaknesses and how we differ, or don’t differ, from any other animal in the world. Our hearts fill with moments and memories of our choosing. What we hold onto is our base for happiness in this life and how we choose to see where we fit in this world. Our outlook on life depends on us but we all inevitably have to accept that in retrospect we are tiny but we still have to live the best we can. It’s all we can do.

