Throughout his work, Joyas Voladoras, Brian Doyle describes the life and the heart of different mammals, focusing on the hummingbird and the blue whale. By contrasting these two, Doyle introduces an interesting idea of life, not only between hummingbirds and whales, but with all living things. “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heart beats to spend in a lifetime” (274).
Hummingbirds live a fast paced life. “Each one visits a thousand flowers a day” Doyle writes, “they can drive at sixty miles an hour…. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest” (273).
Each of these ideas displaying how busy the birds is all hours of the day. But behind every trip to a flower and every mile they cover, is the heart. Doyle claims, “they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate” (273).
Their hearts are beating faster than most of us could even recognize, but it allows them to fly fast and visit thousand upon thousand of flowers in a lifetime. “It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine” (273).
In this statement, Doyle is claiming that the heart just cannot keep up the fast pace of life forever; it eventually wears out and just quits.
The Essay on Clara Peeters Life Works Flowers
Clara Peeters was a famous female still-life painter. It is believed that she was born in the 1594 in Antwerp. Records show that she was baptized there in that year. She lived at least into her sixties. Her last known record was a painting in 1657, but it is now lost. Little is known about the family life and education of Clara Peeters. She was probably born into either a wealthy or artistic ...
Quite different from the fast pace life of a hummingbird, is that of the largest mammal in the world, a blue whale (274).
“It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room” Doyle writes about the heart inside the largest mammal on Earth (274).
With something as large as the blue whale, it takes a massive heart to power a mammal that 100ft. long, and because it is so massive, the heart beats slowly. Doyle explains that while there are 10,000 blue whales on Earth we know almost nothing about their social lives, their habitat or really anything about them for that matter. Although we know very little about blue whales, Doyle writes “But we know this, the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs” (274).
By comparing these two mammals Doyle is showing that there are many different ways to live ones life. Whether it’s a bird, a whale or a human he has connected his idea that there are only two billion heartbeats for every mammal on Earth. While the hummingbird uses it heartbeats quickly, it lives a fast pace and exciting life. Where the blue whale lives for a long time, but has a slower pace in life. I believe that the idea Doyle is truly trying to display is the fact that you have a set number of heartbeats in your life, you can choose to live fast, live wild, and use the heart up fast. Or you can choose to live a laid back, slower pace of life, but live for a longer period of time. I don’t believe he is trying to tell us that one lifestyle is better, or more optimal than that of the other, only that we must choose how to use the 2 billion heartbeats we have been given.
