       “When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall” (Doyle 96).  In “Joyas Volardores,” author Brian Doyle explores the paradoxes of the heart, comparing that of a hummingbird and a blue whale, all the while connecting it back to people. With their tiny heart, hummingbirds live in hyper speed, but their heart can only sustain them for a short time. With their huge hearts, blue whales have long lives filled with the capacity for complex emotion and love, but no happiness in that isolated love. Our heart, the thing that drives us onward, ultimately is the thing that fails us.

       “They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest” (Doyle 95). When talking about the hummingbird, Doyle uses short, choppier sentences that symbolize the life of his subject. Always moving a mile a minute, like Doyle’s sentences, a hummingbird has no time to rest and will ultimately burn out quite quickly. Because the hummingbird is constantly in such a hyperactive state, it’s heart gives out after not too long. The irony of this, as Doyle points out, is that when the hummingbird rests, it comes close to death. “…on frigid nights, or when they are starving… their hearts sludging nearly to a halt…their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be” (Doyle 95). This Schuster 2Schuster 2propensity for constantly moving at 110% both gives the hummingbird it’s life and ultimately takes it away. Doyle uses the hummingbird as a way to metaphorically comment on the lifestyles of people, as can be seen when he “breaks down the fourth wall” in a sense. He speaks directly to the reader, drawing them in when he says “You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.” Oftentimes, a person may feed off a constant sense of purpose and business, but to breeze through life and never take time to enjoy the little things leaves them stressed and overwhelmed. You need to take a break from time to time. You don’t want to melt the engine.

       On the far other side of the spectrum, Doyle dives into the heart of a blue whale. “It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers” (Doyle 95). Doyle starts out by reminding us just how massive of a thing he speaks, and simultaneously humanizes the subject by comparing it to the size of a child. “A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves” (Doyle 95). Unlike the writing style used to talk about the hummingbird, the writing about the blue whale is generally longer, smoother sentences. Doyle does this to create another juxtaposition and remind us of the differences between the hummingbird and the whale. While the hummingbird has one of the smallest hearts in the animal kingdom, the blue whale has the largest one. Doyle correctly points out that despite their polar opposite physical characteristics, both experience similar paradoxes resulting from their hearts. The blue whale’s heart, while massive and allowing it to feel complex emotion and love, ultimately makes it conscious of it’s isolation. Blue whales travel in pairs and bond with another whale to create a life partner, but their calls are constant and can be heard underwater from many miles away. This big heart, full with their likely complex emotion, removes them from the blissful ignorance in which many an animal lives and makes them painfully aware of the isolation and sadness. Doyle is once again creating a metaphor for people, talking about how fortunate the whale is for it’s big heart but Schuster 3Schuster 3ultimately that it results in some level of pain. This is like a person who opens up their heart to the people around them, ultimately this is a blessing, but can result in subsequent pain and disappointment when let down.


       “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… the words I have something to tell you…the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children” (Doyle 96). To explain the paradox of the human heart, Doyle returns to this idea of the heart as a house. He says that no matter how high and strong we build the “walls” around our heart, ultimately this awesome ability we have, the ability to feel, is our downfall. We can fight and fight to feel untouchable and impervious, to turn off our emotions. But even so, it’s the little thing that strikes a chord with your heart, the “brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair” (Doyle 96), that brings those walls you worked so hard to build up, crashing down. It is both a blessing and a curse, this capacity that we have for feeling. As humans, it is our own personal paradox.

       Doyle wrote this piece to remind people to be thankful for the blessing that they have, but also to tell them to be wary with it. Picking apart his writing about the hummingbird and the blue whale, it almost feels like he is showing the reader how much worse off the other creatures have it. Then when he gets around the talking about people, Doyle gets much more sentimental and relatable, commenting on our more complex heart, capable of more advanced emotion, and filled with such things as our families. Doyle essentially wrote this to say “look how great you have it, don’t waste this blessing that you’ve been given.”

Doyle brings together three vastly different lives, that of a tiny little hummingbird, a huge blue whale, and a human being: which lands somewhere between the first two. Strife with Schuster 4Schuster 4differences, he manages to connect these three beings by this idea that they all coexist with a similar struggle. Different in size, social patterns, cognitive and emotional capacity, and more, all of these beings must live with this paradox of the heart. Whether it is the hummingbird living in it’s little hyperspeed world, the blue whale with its long life of isolated emotional awareness, or the human who builds up towering walls around his or her heart only to see them come crashing down, it is the thing that drives us onward, the heart, that will finally fail us. 
