




The story “Joyas Volardores” by Brian Doyle is a different type of story. This type of writing is tough to understand especially with the different amount of comparisons and talking about the different hearts in animals. Doyle does this for a reason, though, once you get to the end of this story and Doyle discusses what’s held in the heart and that “So much held in a heart in a lifetime” (96). Doyle is not just talking about the way you are alive with this saying, instead, he is talking more about the meaning of the heart. The meaning of a heart is complex and different for everyone. It is created by yourself at a young age and changes slightly depending on the things that happen in your life. 

Doyle doesn’t use humans in the story, until the end, as examples in the story; he illustrates the differences in animals to later to discuss the different type of hearts. Doyle talks about hummingbirds and the way they live their life. “A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser” (Doyle 94). This doesn’t seem like anything, but Doyle is using the hummingbird as an example of a heart that does things quickly and lives its life at a fast paced, even though it is so tiny. The hummingbird is doing everything full throttle and in an instance, it can crash and die completely. There is so little that the hummingbird does because it tries to do everything in an instance. The hummingbird doesn’t savor anything it goes on its way as fast as it can through life. The meaning of the heart to the hummingbird is something to be used fast and that should have little to no rest. Then all of a sudden Doyle starts talking about the complete opposite of the hummingbird. He starts talking about blue whales and their hearts. These hearts are the biggest in the world. The way that the blue whale lives its life is different compared to the hummingbird. There are so many blue whales in the ocean and we know almost nothing of them. Doyle is trying to demonstrate that no matter who it is you will never truly know another’s heart even if you think it would be easy to know what they do. The best you can do for understanding others hearts is to assume, but you will never be able to understand others hearts.

People try to understand other organisms in life all the time. We call this science, but this is an impossible feat. Why is it impossible, though? Well, we obviously know generally, the nature of organisms, but we don’t know what their dreams are, what they crave in life. The hearts of these organisms are different with themselves and different from us also. The only thing we know for sure is we all want something out of life after all “we all churn inside” (Doyle 96). The meaning of this is that the one similarity that all are hearts have is that each heart wants something which could be as simple as getting a certain food at the time or it can be as big as completing your dream. This one similarity is what leads us to try to learn about others and to connect with the heart in a way. The problem is that we can’t understand what each other want.

There is so much in the world that a person will never understand and the individual hearts of different creatures or even other human beings is one of those things. Doyle states this with “we open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart” (96). Every person has different experiences and different ways they will react to these situations that will create who they are. There can be people that are similar to each other, but they will never be exactly the same. There are always differences in people and for any person, no matter who they are, you will never be able to understand their heart. The choices people make will also be different for each person. Obviously, some people will choose the same choices for a single experience, but if there were multiple different experiences for a group of people there will be different choices within those experiences. Now you might think that this isn’t really important, but this is probably one of the most important things that humans try to understand. Everyone is trying to understand one another after all whether it is through learning other languages, religion, or different types of government. It doesn’t stop there, though; it is in the small parts of life too. Have you ever talked to your friends and didn’t understand the meaning of what they said and you wondered what it meant? That’s you trying to understand them and the reason you don’t know what they are saying might be because it’s a saying from where he used to live or it just might’ve come from an experience he had in the past. Everyone is always trying to understand one another because everyone wants to connect to another in some way and they want to be able to learn what others want in life and more importantly want others to know what they truly want in life. 

Doyle demonstrates with this that there are so many differences in hearts and that we will never truly understand each other. The fact that the hummingbird and blue whale have completely different intentions summarizes his reason. Even between people, there is always differences in each heart. The meaning of each heart is completely different and people will always be trying to find these differences. After all, if we were ever able to break this barrier of the heart, we would be able to connect to everyone and all of a sudden we would have a very different world. 