
By using biological aspects of the heart, the author of Joyas Volardores, Brian Doyle, eliminates emotions typically elicited when discussing the topic of love. Love is not only an emotional topic, but also one that is associated with feelings of happiness, comfort, and desire to spend time with others. There is no way to measure an amount of love or to test the feeling of love. However, the author of the text provides scientific discovery and physical anatomy to define these rarely noted qualities of love. Doyle includes research based facts about the physical attributes of hearts of particular animals to support the intangible characteristics of love such as, the physical size of one’s heart, the complexity of one’s heart, the number of personal relationships one possesses, and the age of the individual. 

The ability to love in both animals and humans is not limited by the physical size of one’s heart.  In the text, Doyle provides example of two animals with extremely different size hearts.  He emphasizes the tiny size of a hummingbird’s heart with a comparison to, “the size of a pencil eraser” (Doyle, 94) and a second reference is made to the hummingbird’s heart being the size of “an infant’s fingernail.” (pg. 95) He contrasts that description to the enormity of the heart found in a blue whale. Doyle describes this heart as, “It weighs more than seven tons. It is as big as a room.” (pg. 95) This is a literal comparison of two vastly different physical size hearts that is provided as symbolic representation of the limitless volume of love each individual is capable of feeling.  A human example to support this is the love between a mother and newborn. This love for something so small begins before the baby is even born. By comparing the physical size of the two non-human hearts, Doyle is able to support the inference that love is possible regardless of heart size.

Relationships are often complicated, requiring a balance of demographic respect with understanding of heritage to survive; however, Doyle writes of a different complexity, he describes the intricate biological differences of different non-human hearts that can be applied to human love. He emphasizes the different configurations of hearts such as, “Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have harts with three chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single chambered hearts.” (Doyle, 96) Doyle supports that regardless of how each heart is designed, each is capable of experiencing love. He also includes a mechanical description of the hummingbird metabolism and heart activity. He compares the hummingbird heart to an engine and details the function, “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.” (pg. 95) By providing the mechanical description, he eliminates any emotional connection and instead focuses on the mechanical survival that must occur. Doyle provides support that the physical heart of these animals is both complex in its formation but also the way it must function for survival in the wilderness. These literal, factual applications can be applied to the relationships that both humans and non-humans experience.

Age is not a limiting factor in the ability to experience love. Boyle limits love to our time on Earth, he describes, “Every creature on Earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.” (pg. 95) This statement supports that all creatures possess the emotion of love regardless of how long they live. Another biological example of love transpiring regardless of age is the shift in the blue whale’s love of its mother to its mating partner. Boyle describes the blue whale consuming, “a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human kin…” (pg.95) The author does not share this as a testimony to the survival skills of the whale but to further support that regardless of age, the emotion of love, as demonstrated by partnering, is a necessity like that of love for nurturing when young.  The emotion of love is not defined by the age of the recipient or the age of the admirer.

Doyle does not limit his discussion to the ability of non-humans to love, but includes a reminder to how fragile the emotion of love is and how quickly love can be lost. Doyle provides examples of what happens when relations are challenged; for one, he presents what happens to the hummingbird, “when they have to rest they come close to death; on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.” (Doyle, 95) This can be applied to humans as well, if we do not have healthy relationships that allow us to be loved or to love we will not survive. In the last paragraph of the text, Boyle reminds the reader of the many times that love is experience from an hour, a moment, a day, to a lifetime. As a reader, each individual person is exposed to different relationships and each takes a risk to love one another. Boyle reinforces that without the emotion of love one could not survive as stated, “we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart.” (pg. 96) Lastly, the author emphasizes that even if one tires to avoid the emotion of love or to protect themselves from the pain of losing love, it will always find one’s vulnerability. To summarize the value of love for both human and non-humans, Doyle describes, “Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all, but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.” (pg. 96) Thus there are no boundaries for the ability to love or the amount of love we can endure. By focusing on the biological aspects of animals versus humans, Boyle is able to transcend the stereotype of love, showing the limitless values love possesses. 