Life and Love in Living

Life and Love in Living

Michael “Tate” Simmons
Writing 1 Thursdays-6pm
30 April 2013
Life And Love In Living
In the essay “Joyas Voladoras,” Brian Doyle starts to connect hummingbirds to whales and then to humans by first explaining the physicality of the hummingbird. He describes a hummingbird’s heartbeat, followed by a brief synopsis of the bird’s physical and behavioral patterns while going into amazing detail about the struggles and needs that they go through on a daily basis. In doing so he brings this immense emotion into and almost empathetic feeling into the piece so that the reader, who is human of course, can almost relate to the bird.
As he did with the hummingbird he goes on to describe a blue whale’s physical attributes and behavior. He then explains that when whales turn about seven or eight years of age they endear an unimaginable puberty, and after that we as humans know basically nothing of what goes on in a blue whales lifetime. The lines that follows, “However we do know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles," shows that blue whales, like humans, yearn for a connection between each other.
Doyle wraps up the physical attributes of each by stating how many chambers all living creatures have in their hearts, and how even organisms without hearts have fluid eternally in motion inside. The hummingbirds, the whale, and the human body all having four-chambered hearts. This is where you really start to see how he connects the three subjects together. He also states earlier in the piece that, "Every creature on earth has
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approximately 2,000,000,000 heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be 200 years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old." In doing so he shows that all creatures only have a certain amount of...

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