
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” (Blaise Pascal). Brian Doyle is a successful Canadian writer who composes novels and children’s books, drawn on by his own personal experiences and memories. Doyle’s household was not that of a picturesque nuclear family. His father was a cruel man with a heavy drinking problem, and his mother was an overwhelmed caretaker; having to keep a watchful eye on Doyle’s mentally disabled older sister. Doyle argues that, the heart is a delicate and complex muscle that we try to shelter but always seem to come up short. In Joyas Volardores, Brian Doyle proves this thesis to be true by developing and illustrating a tale of nature through the use of metaphorical comparisons between animals, their hearts, and reality. 

Hummingbirds are miniscule, colorful animals with iridescent feathers and a hunger for nectar. These fascinating creatures are Doyle’s first example of the tender heart and furthermore, how living can be “expensive.” Hummingbirds put a lot of strain on their bodies on a day to day basis. Their hearts beat ten times a second, each one can visit up to a thousand flowers a day, and they have the ability to fly for five hundred miles without a breather. But when they stop, every burden and draining exercise the hummingbird has put their body through hits them like a ton of bricks. Doyle goes into a very harsh contradiction of the accomplishments and wonders of the hummingbird to the very severe reality of their lives when he says, “But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing barely beating…” (95). This comparison demonstrates how anxiety on the heart doesn’t always have to be emotional. Some people have an outlook on life that we’re born, we work, and we die. This would essentially be the life of the hummingbird. Doyle later goes on to state, “…if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.” (95) In this case, what is “sweet” is not just the nectar. In order to survive, which are all creature’s primal instincts, what is sweet is shelter, warmth, or whatever it takes to keep their pencil eraser sized hearts beating for another day. No matter how hard these tiny flying jewels try, they can’t fight what their bodies do to them. This is metaphorically enhanced when Doyle utters, “Flying is expensive. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.” (95) Flying isn’t an option for a bird, it’s their life. The price of any living creature is approximately two billion heart beats and how you spend that currency is not always a choice. Why God would make ticking time bombs disguised as such beautiful creatures, I couldn’t tell you. These wonders do what they can to protect their hearts. Hummingbirds are instinctual beings who need to fly and blossom in order to be productive members of their society, but even the smallest rest can break them down into nothing and make them pay the ultimate price. 

Doyle contradicts the above theory when he jumps to review earth’s monster; the blue whale. He present evidence to express it is possible to save your heart from agony, you just need to disappear. Doyle’s first example is presented when he dives straight in, to examine the gentle giant’s heart; “It is a room, with four chambers.” (95) When I hear the word chamber, what comes to mind is a formal gathering room, or possibly something more private; possibly a bedroom. Generally, bedrooms reside in houses so by this logic, home truly is where the heart is. Doyle then goes on to discuss the valves of the whale’s heart. Their size, their power, their essential job within the whale. But if you think about valves themselves, they control the passage of fluid through the heart, only allowing movement in one direction. This can be further interpreted as an “in one ear out the other” concept. There has been research to prove whales have the ability to express and feel a wide range of emotions. Whales do have a language of their own but in this case, they are passing cruel feelings through their hearts not their ears. People use this technique to not allow other’s brutal words to crawl under their skin. The most significant factor of the blue whale is that even though they are the largest mammal on the face of the earth, we don’t know a lot about them. This is explained when Doyle expresses, “There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing.” (96) The oceans of the world are undiscovered canvases of wonder, and the blue whale does an astounding job of hiding themselves in the shadows of the vast openness. They are on the endangered animal list, and the real predator of these ocean spectacles, is man. The whales run into large boats that we use to harm their environments and distress their solar canals. In turn to all this pollution, they abstain from human life. They do what they can to guard themselves from harm’s way and future generations. To be honest, they’re pretty astounding at it. Throughout the progression of this excerpt, Brian Doyle looks on the greener side of the grass. He expresses that you can successfully protect your heart and live a long, joyful life. All you need to do is hide yourself from the rest of humanity.

To close up the dissection of the heart, Doyle looks through a broader spectrum of humanity as a whole and brings his comparisons to a more personal level. His first example is, “Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber.” (96) As previously discussed, if we keep with the metaphor of the chambers in the heart being compared to a more personal sense, it is arguable that as organisms have a decreasing number of chambers, they become more impersonal. Therefore, they have less to lose and less risk of getting hurt. Doyle brings up an emotional loophole when he declares, “We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.” (96) Doyle uses this allegory to again compare the heart to a home setting and bring it to a more personal level. When someone invades our home we feel a lack of trust and violated, much like we would when someone pulls at our heartstring and then suddenly let’s go. The paragraph goes on to discuss how humanity couldn’t allow ourselves to come across so vulnerable because we constantly fear getting emotionally damaged. Doyle does a brilliant job in his final sentence of this piece to wrap up the overall theme of attempting to protect oneself. He states, “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…” (96) This quote takes human emotion to the next level in displaying how the heart interacts with everyday life experiences. When we get hurt by someone or something we build walls, but all it takes is one simple interaction to collapse those defenses and to make you open a window. Much like in romantic relationships, everyone is wrong until someone is right. 

This short writing piece, Joyas Volardores by Brian Doyle, is one large metaphor for the human heart and its complexities. Doyle uses the majority of his texts to discuss the fact that the heart is a gentle and multifaceted muscle that goes through a lot in its two billion heart beats and that we are conditioned, as organisms of this earth, to protect it. He also does a thorough job of analyzing the fact that we aren’t very good at it. To contradict the original theory, it is brought to light that it’s possible to guard yourself from harm’s way when Doyle examines the techniques of the blue whale, but I believe he does this to display that there is hope in humanity. Not everyone gets hurt and for those we are all very jealous. This is a touchy subject for most, especially those that have already been through this pain, but no one should be afraid to “open their windows.” Every person you meet, whether it be a positive or a negative interaction, can be a learning experience. Even though the chances are you will be hurt and you will hide yourself behind walls, someone or something will come along and be willing to peel back your layers to see who you started out as. 