There has not been a piece of literature that has shown such deep meaning and emotion to me as Joyas Volardores by Brian Doyle. The essay is one that moves, explains, and uncovers the two polar opposite emotions we feel, pain and love, combining the two together using unique elements in a yin-yang fashion. Most importantly, the reader is exposed to an unfamiliar twist on something so natural to humans: the concept of time being represented as a beat from the heart.

A great element present in Brian Doyle’s writing is the use of time. Usually, we think of time as in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Doyle introduces the concept of time in terms of heartbeats and that is something very powerful that stands out in the essay. The fact that is a beat or a pump from the heart, that was no coincidence on the part of Doyle’s writing. The heart is the universal symbol love. Anything we may do in life, your hearts emotions will be in jeopardy. The heartbeats we exhaust determine how long we ‘live’ and how the pain affects us throughout our lives. Time is an overlaying theme of the story. From Doyle’s perspective, how one distributes time in their life, determines how long their life is. Doyle says, “the price of their ambition is a life closer to death… you can spend the (heartbeats) slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old” (Doyle 95). This is saying that you could tax your body right away by getting the thrill of your life by living life the risky way, or you could live a lot longer if you conserve your high-risk behavior. It is up to you and you could take it whichever way you want to. But, one thing that Doyle says in the final paragraph, “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and it all comes down in an instant” (Doyle 96). This gives the reader an a-ha moment about the comment about living longer like a tortoise or living shorter like a hummingbird. No matter how old you live, you can protect yourself as much as you want, but you’re going to experience just as much pain as the next person, no matter how much you protect yourself. It is very unique how Brian Doyle uses time in reference of heartbeats. The beats are produced by the heart. The universal symbol for love, whether it may be good or bad, you cannot avoid something in which has been rooted to your soul. 

In this essay, a reoccurring tool Doyle would use was drastically separating two things, only to simply compare them as the same. When talking about hummingbirds, Doyle would explain the hummingbirds heart as something that we could only hear when “we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests” (Doyle 94). As well as the heart was “the size of a pencil eraser” (Doyle 94). The human heart is much bigger than that and it beats at a completely different pace than the hummingbird. Later, Doyle says a child could walk through the 4 chambers of a blue whale’s heart. This imagery helps the reader compare what these may be like in terms of the human. But then throughout the passage, Doyle will bring them all back together again. Doyle says, “every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime” (Doyle 95).  As well as, “no living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside” (Doyle 96). Doyle has done this to show the massive differences between whales, hummingbirds, and humans. But he had separate them to show the ultimate similarity of everyone having a heart, no matter how small, large, or intelligent they may be. This is important to the story because it all comes down to the emotions felt in your heart, whether we feel pain or we feel love, we all feel these emotions and have to deal with them. It may not necessarily be saying that whales and hummingbirds feel these emotions like we do, but every different human feels these and feels them in their own way. 

In conclusion, Brian Doyle used multiple, beautiful elements that had highlighted his theme of the story, not just about the anatomy hummingbirds and blue whales. Rather than anatomy, it was about pain and love and suffering and life. The uniqueness of taking the epicenter of what’s commonly viewed as a symbol of love in terms as a currency of living, along with contrasting polar opposites and bringing them to a common ground to emphasize how we all feel emotions in unique ways which are present Joyas Volardores remind the reader to always let love in while living throughout your days – there is no avoiding it!  