Heart and beliefs: People’s flying jewels
Joyas voladoras is an essay made by Brian Doyle in which he gives his own point of view about the importance of life and love by providing metaphors using different types of animals. He starts by explaining in detail the life of a hummingbird, a small, beautiful bird who has an ephemeral life of only two years because that’s how its cardiac system works, so when it is not up searching for flowers, it is in a hibernation state where sometimes it never wakes up because all its energy burned out. “…their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be”. This could be taken as an allegory for how some people have had hard lives, with bad experience after bad experience, to the point where sometimes they don’t recover because it is too much pain to bare alone. “…a brilliant music stilled”. Maybe this people would have had so much to give if their experiences resulted how they wanted them to be instead of how they turned out to be, like a man that kept falling in love with the wrong women to the point all that is left in his heart is numbness, or the child that is bullied at school over and over until he loses the will of living.
“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”. Even if they know they could end up hurt, sometimes people don’t give up in matters of finding true love, or simply in living their lives to the top because that’s what motivates them to keep going, they remain faithful for the sake of it.
Doyle compares the life of a hummingbird with the life of a tortoise in a sense of how hummingbirds live “fast” and tortoises live “slow” but they live the same amount of time regardless. “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them 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”. This could be an analogy of how some people live life at is fullest because they don’t know if the next day they’re going to wake up at all, and some people just stick to a normal, plain way of living; although he doesn’t criticize this, because everyone can choose how to live their own lives.
The author also makes a comparison of the size of a hummingbird’s heart to the one of a blue whale, this to ...
