Of all of the pieces that we have read through and examined in our time in this class, the one that caught my eye was Joyas Valadores by Brian Doyle. Joyas Valadores uses the idea of the incredible things that certain animal’s hearts can do to show the differences in humans and animals in order to display the extent of human feelings and emotions. Brian Doyle does a fantastic job of giving what he has to say a great setting by writing about incredible animals and relating that to his message. 

Doyle begins the essay by writing about the heart of the hummingbird and how it is about the size of a pencil eraser. Despite its size, Doyle writes that it is able to beat harder than our ears would allow us to hear if we pushed our ears up against their bodies. “Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. 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 to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts slugging 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). While we, as humans, are unable to even come close to achieving those goals. What we are capable of doing however, is experiencing the entire spectrum of human emotion. Hummingbirds cannot feel intense sadness because of what someone said to them. A hummingbird will never have a bad day because of something frightening that it saw. 

At the same time however, Doyle notes the fact that even though we have all of these amazing emotions, we cannot simply turn them off. We try our best to build up walls around ourselves and not let the things that we see and hear affect us. And yet, the simplest of things can send those walls tumbling down. I can see a fine example of this in my life. When I was about 11 or 12, my Grandmother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. The disheartening thing about lung cancer is that when someone has it, in some cases they are given an estimation of the time they have left. My Grandma went through Chemo but it did not help much, I remember coming home from school and seeing her in so much pain and wishing she did not have to go through it. I knew that when my Grandma passed, she would finally not have to deal with any of the pain anymore. I built up a wall with the fact that she would finally experience relief when she passes away. She even told us to be happy when she did pass because that would mean she was done and could have respite. Despite all of this, when my Grandmother did pass, it felt like the wall that I had built up was never there to begin with. It felt worse than when she was diagnosed, or any of the times that she was living through it. It shows that even if you try your hardest to hold back your emotions, they will break through eventually. I am fairly confident that Hummingbirds do not experience this problem.

All of this being said, Doyle does a fantastic job of transitioning from Hummingbirds to the Blue Whales of (every) ocean. “The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car” (Doyle). It is amazing to think that our hearts essentially work the same as these massive mammals. Even though the hearts of Blue whales are so large in size, they are still unable to experience the insane range of emotions that humans are capable of experiencing. Doyle does a fantastic job of relating these gigantic creatures to humans in the sense that we both have hearts.

Doyle finishes the essay by writing about humans and instead of talking about what they can do physically, he writes about the emotions that humans experience. This is interesting because, while humans may not be the strongest, fastest, or most marvelous being on the earth, we are still capable of feeling a huge range of emotions. “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, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.” (Doyle). In this passage, Doyle is talking about the profound impact that emotions have on our everyday life. Doyle makes a point of referencing these other animals in order to show that while we, as humans, do not have the same power or abilities that these fantastic creatures do, we have something more fantastic. We have the ability to experience fully the emotions that come from the experiences in life, large and small. 

In conclusion, Joyas Valadores uses the idea of the incredible things that certain animal’s hearts can do to show the differences in humans and animals in order to display the extent of human feelings and emotions. I found this essay very engaging and I enjoyed reading it and watching Doyle relate these things. It is very insightful the way that Doyle uses something as engaging and interesting as these magnificent creatures to show us something about ourselves.
