Hearts and Humans
By: Phu Nguyen
Tags: Heart, Human Behavior

Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

Recently, I have read an essay by Brian Doyle called “Joyas Voladoras” which talks about hummingbirds and how their heart beats at an incredible pace to maintain energy for flight. While reading, A thought came to mind as the passage started talking about the price that the hummingbirds pays for fast heart rates. They live a shorter life and they are easily burnt out. The message that I got out of reading this passage was that there are many people who readily give out their hearts, and live a life on the edge, but they always end early. I was amazed at how he is using the beating of a hummingbird’s heart to make an analogy on human behavior, interactions, and their similarities.

The essay doesn’t only talk about the hearts of a hummingbird, for example in the fourth paragraph Doyle describes the heart of the whale, the largest mammal on Earth, which also has the largest heart on Earth. As an extra piece rhetorical analysis that I found interesting as it isn’t often used, he used diction with the word “waaaaay” that is intentionally grammatically incorrect to emphasize the large size of the whale’s heart. In the same paragraph talking about whales, the quote “… For next to nothing is known of their mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, disease, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of blue whale.” The long sentence mentions things that are often associated with humans rather than animals like blue whales. This could be another analogy made by Doyle but I believe this one could be about how there are people on Earth who we have no idea about because of differences in location, race, language, religion. But we still share commonalities like having a family, or friends, and that there should be no reason for us to disconnect ourselves from them.

The next paragraph disrupted my thoughts on the essay because previously I thought that a lot of this essay will connect the heart to human emotions, but the fifth paragraph is different. It talks about unicellular bacteria that don’t even have a heart but they have liquid inside their body that still move around transporting nutrients and cleaning waste. They still “churn inside” like everything else. This paragraph connects conflict in emotion that everyone faces not with the heart, because it is absent in a unicellular bacteria. Instead the conflicting emotion is being compared to the eternal flowing of fluids inside all creatures, whether it be blood, or the liquid in the cytoplasm. We can tell that this connection is made in the short sentence “we all churn inside.” As this sentence has two meaning, one is literal about the liquid, and the second about the turmoil of our thoughts and emotions.

The heart is mentioned again in the next paragraph as the last one is more direct in its writing. There are many parts in the paragraph that made think deeply about it or feel awe at it, but the part that I found most thought provoking was “…the words I have something to tell you,…” the phrase that is mentioned is often used in many variety of situation and begin to think about different situation and what the people are feeling in those situations. Every time the phrase is used, the listener will always feel anxious and scared of the next word, while the speaker’s next words can either be positive or negative. They might be talking about an illness, or maybe a break-up in a relationship, or even issues about their financial situation. All these different scenarios always bring emotions with them.

Overall, I found this essay very fascinating to read because of all its little nuances about emotions and feelings. There are most likely many things that I have missed while reading this essay, but from the connections that I found, there were many interesting analogies made. Hummingbirds live a life with lots of conflict and is short-lived, whales are mysterious but they still share a commonality with us, and unicellular bacteria still have inner turmoil even without a heart.