Dec 10, · Doyle’s essay uses science and vivid descriptions to depict how powerful yet fragile the organ is. The author’s purpose was to show that amongst all animals, they have a Jun 12, · Since this short essay by Brian Doyle was published in the Scholar 15 years ago, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times on our website and often borrowed for classroom use. It is the lead piece in a just-published collection of Brian’s essays called One Long River of Sound: Notes on Wonder. Brian died at the age of 60 in Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins Dec 10, · Throughout the essay, Brian Doyle describes the life of a hummingbird, a blue whale, and a tortoise. Even though these animals vary in size, shape, and life expectancy, these animals all share a common organ: the heart
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Since this short essay by Brian Doyle was published in the Scholar 15 years ago, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times on our website and often borrowed for classroom use. Brian died at the age of 60 in Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. Joyas voladorasflying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, brian doyle essay, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, 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, brian doyle essay.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their brian doyle essay muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen.
Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. 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. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. 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, brian doyle essay.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It is a room, brian doyle essay, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves.
The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a brian doyle essay drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car.
It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama brian doyle essay day and gains two hundred pounds a day, brian doyle essay, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, brian doyle essay, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale.
There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, brian doyle essay, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing.
But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel brian doyle essay pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles. Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts.
Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling.
No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside. So much held in a heart in a lifetime, brian doyle essay. So much held in a heart in a day, brian doyle essay, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart.
When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, brian doyle essay by force of character, yet fragile and rickety brian doyle essay, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall, brian doyle essay.
Brian Brian doyle essayan essayist and novelist, died on May 27, To read Epiphanies, his longtime blog for the Scholarplease go here, brian doyle essay. The U. government recently declared 23 birds, fish, and other species extinct, calling to mind this essay from Parker Bauer on the now-extinct dusky seaside sparrow. Tuning Up - Winter Joyas Voladoras Revisiting an ode to the heart by one of our best-loved writers By Brian Doyle June 12, Andrew E.
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Joyas Voladoras ~ Brian Doyle (Reading and Analysis)
, time: 31:01God Is Love: Essays from Portland Magazine: Doyle, Brian: blogger.com: Books
Dec 10, · Doyle’s essay uses science and vivid descriptions to depict how powerful yet fragile the organ is. The author’s purpose was to show that amongst all animals, they have a Brian Doyle () was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He was the author of six collections of essays, two nonfiction books, two collections of “proems,” the short story collection Bin Laden’s Bald Spot, the novella Cat’s Foot, and the novels Mink River, The Plover, and Martin Marten Jun 12, · Since this short essay by Brian Doyle was published in the Scholar 15 years ago, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times on our website and often borrowed for classroom use. It is the lead piece in a just-published collection of Brian’s essays called One Long River of Sound: Notes on Wonder. Brian died at the age of 60 in Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins
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