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 various animals and their idiosyncratic characteristics. However, as the uniqueness of each heart is being observed and analyzed, there is a commonality that is shared amongst all of them; this commonality that they share is the pain that strains them. Doyle hints at that the heart endures similar struggles throughout his intricate prose. Despite leaving trails of this notion in his descriptions of each animal’s heart and emphasizing it in the last paragraph of his prose, the cause of this subject is not brought to the light in discussions enough. Even though all of the animals mentioned in the prose and their hearts undertake drastically different routines in their respective courses of life, their hearts all meet at a crossroads of pain caused by their obsession with their fulfillment.  

Happiness is a drug that can cause a withdrawal that no individual or creature can escape. In the case of the hummingbird, to go along with the mere size of the creature and its heart, the rapid pace of life contributes to the strain that its heart faces in its lifetime. A hummingbird lives a very fast pace life with a lot of potential risk because it does 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. In spite of this damage to the hummingbird’s heart, there is no slowing down for the hummingbird. It is addicted to this risk-filled, high speed lifestyle and do not let go, in order to maintain its body temperature. Without knowing that this apparent triumph from surviving unfavorable conditions within its environment is short lived, the hummingbird continues this insane rate of activity, in order to just stay warm and survive. It blindly races its way to physical exhaustion and a butchered heart. Doyle elaborates on the hummingbird’s heart to the detriment of its dangerously swift pace of life: “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 bombarded by its ceaseless and rapid actions that the bird cannot last. 

Doyle continues to plant the idea of pain and suffering from this craze to assuage desire with 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). As said in Doyle’s prose, a blue whale has a very comforting and lavish lifestyle in the early stages of its life and grows to be a magnificent creature. However after that is all over, nothing is known “of mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, [or] arts” of the mature blue whale (Doyle 95). It seems as if the blue whale falls off the radar as the massive creature reaches maturity and goes off on its own in search of a life that provides similar satisfaction. Despite this quest to find contentment elsewhere, not only families, but also the individual whales themselves are scarce; 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”, indicating the possible repetition of failure to recreate the comfort that was experienced earlier in their lives (Doyle 96). The heart of a blue whale is thought to adhere to a life of solace and comfort, but the blue whale’s never ending cries of desire suggest something completely different; these sorrowful bawls propose that these blue whales are still intensely searching for a renewed form of their elapsed serenity as they venture through the desolate depths of the ocean.

Regardless, of what of a life is perceived to be, the heart always faces hardship because of dissatisfaction, no matter whose heart it is and what the circumstances are. As Doyle says, “[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 constantly under attack throughout all stages of life from struggles that spawn from a fixation on achieving and maintaining fulfillment; these struggles consist of love, heartbreak, loss of a loved one, loneliness, defeat/failure, etc. All any individual has to defend his or her heart is himself, or herself, and the diminishing hope that, in the near future, the conditions of life will bend and allow the attainment of what is desired. Money cannot fix the damage. Outside people cannot save the heart from further trauma. Hobbies and activities cannot abidingly distract and preoccupy the heart. As stated in Doyle’s prose, “[all] hearts...are bruised and scarred, scorned and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character” (Doyle, 96). There is no escaping this inevitable fate. All hearts take different paths with all sorts of twists and turns. All hearts work in different ways and take in different experiences. However, all hearts end up in the same destination; a place where hearts plead in symphony to make their desires become realities.

Hearts differ in a myriad of ways. For example, 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, find themselves torn by the same emotional torture from the lack of fulfillment that never seems to fade away. No heart can evade this struggle, nor can it move on from it, no matter where one is, or what one comes across in life. The heart is addicted to what it truly desires, not what is left available for it to have; the heart’s addiction to what it desires is insatiable by substitutes that attempt to replace the heart’s desires and unquenchable by the sparse amount of time that the heart gets what it desires. There will always be something, or someone that drives the heart around an endless, burden-filled loop of misery that stems from an obsession with achieving lifelong satisfaction. 
