All hearts operate differently. There is no denying, or arguing that fact. A heart’s endurance, pace, size, etc. all vary from creature to creature. A hummingbird’s heart beats at an extremely rapid rate of “ten times a second”, almost popping out of the hummingbird’s chest every time it beats, and is the “size of a pencil eraser” (Doyle, 94). A blue whale’s heart is vast “room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through valves”, and it serves an animal that is “a hundred feet long” (Doyle, 95). An adult human heart is about the size of “two fists” and “beats about 100,000 times in one day”(Amazing Heart Facts). Every heart acts differently. The author of Joyas Volardores, Brian Doyle, goes into vivid detail of the hearts of different animals and how the specifics of how the hearts differ. However, as the specifics of what is different about each heart are being looked at, the similarities of hearts are overlooked, such as what strains it. Doyle hints at that the heart endures similar struggles throughout his prose. He leaves trails of this notion in his descriptions of each animal’s heart before emphasizing it in the last paragraph of his prose, but it is not brought to the light in discussions enough. By looking at the consequences that all the animals that are portrayed in Joyas Volardores face, we can see that all hearts face very similar struggles in life, such as loneliness and suffering, despite all their differences which most readers do not see; this is important because it allows people to understand that no one has it easy in life, regardless of how well of one is.

Doyle keeps this idea embedded within the description of the heart for each animal. In the case of the hummingbird, the mere size of the creature and its heart contribute to the strain that it faces in its lifetime. A hummingbird lives a very fast pace life with a lot of potential risk because it has to do so much. The heart of a hummingbird pumps blood so hard and so frequently that the walls of the heart become stiff, which in turn affects the blood flow within the hummingbird's body. On top of that, there is no slowing down for the hummingbird. It must maintain this insane rate of activity in order to just stay warm and survive. “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death.; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine” (Doyle, 95). A hummingbird’s heart is so bombarded by so much activity that the bird cannot last. 

Doyle plants the idea of struggle and loneliness through the blue whale as well. A blue whale has a vast and enormous heart. It has the “biggest in the world” and “weighs more than seven tons” (Doyle, 95). Through Doyle’s descriptions, a blue whale has a very comforting lifestyle in the early stages of its life and grows to be a magnificent creature. However after that it all over, nothing is known “of mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, [or] arts” (Doyle, 95). It seems as if the blue whale falls off the radar after it goes off on its own. Families are rarely found and there are only about “ten thousand left in the world” (Doyle, 95). All that is heard is “their penetrating moaning cries” and “their piercing yearning tongue” (Doyle, 96). The heart of a blue whale is thought to adhere to a life of solace and comfort, but the blue whale’s cries of desire suggest something completely different.

Regardless, of what of a life is perceived to be, the heart always faces hardship no matter who it is and no matter what the circumstances are. “ So much is held in a heart in a lifetime. So much is held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end–not mother and father; not husband and wife; not lover; not child, not friend” (Doyle, 96). A heart is attacked constantly throughout life from all sorts of struggles that we face such as love, heartbreak, loss of a loved one, loneliness, defeat/failure, etc. All we have to defend it is ourselves. Money cannot fix the damage. People cannot save the heart from further. Hobbies and activities cannot the heart escape forever. “All hearts...are bruised and scarred, scorned and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character” (Doyle, 96). No matter what there is no escaping this fate. All hearts take different paths with all sorts of twists and turns. All hearts work in different ways and experience different things. However, all hearts end up in the same destination when life puts them through suffering and loneliness.

Hearts differ in all sorts of ways. Some hearts are larger in size than other hearts. Some hearts beat faster than others. Some hearts last longer than others. In the end, however, all hearts, no matter what, are torn by the same emotional struggles. There is no avoiding, no matter where one is in life. There will always be something stressing the heart. There will always be something that make the heart feel separated from the world. 
