"Joyas Voladoras" was originally published in The American Scholar and later reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize.
I teach "Joyas Voladoras" each year as an example of one of the few--1 or 2--pieces of imaginative literature that brings me to tears. That I should feel such an emotion each time I read the work is a testament to Doyle's ability to craft a self-contained, polished, and permanent piece of work. Doyle's essay is the perfect work to example and dramatize the difference between sentimentality (unearned emotion in fiction--to paraphrase John Gardner) and sentiment (earned, authentic emotion--Gardner again).
Doyle's tendency toward flowing, organic, and recursive sentences, not to mention his willingness to reinvent and make complex words, position him firmly in the lineage of Irish writers from Yeats/Joyce forward. He's a living Gael poet, in a way, and "Joyas" is a sequence of paragraphs that feel like prose poems with a point.
Doyle begins by asking us to "consider the hummingbird." I like the word "consider," and not think, or ponder, or reflect, or imagine. Consider is more caring, and its Ignatian in the way Father Martin explicated that term: Doyle wants us to really understand and discover a minute animal, and to be open-minded about the process and the potential results.
Doyle's narrative starts with, and returns to, the hummingbird's heart. Small and fragile as it is, it's powerful, complex, and exactly the type of natural object we need to fully consider. Doyle focuses on the paradox of the heart, of the bird: small, powerful, able and dynamic, they also are fragile: "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."
So close to death are those fully in life, it seems. Doyle follows with a litany of hummingbirds. From a craft perspective, this is smart writing, a sure way to avoid the sentimentality of lesser pieces. Doyle is direct, and he's honest: we've got this life, so what are we going to do with it?
"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."
There are so many ways to consider aging: moving forward, notching away the days left. A set amount of heartbeats is frightening, and yet, in a way, comforting: we sort-of know where we're going. We've got a finite time here and, like the hummingbird, we live a much shorter life than those redwoods near Doyle's neck of the forest. It's sad to think about, certainly--there's so much to love in the here and now, and a writer like Doyle exists to give us a nudge (or a punch in the face, perhaps) to open our eyes, notice, record, and reflect.
Doyle moves from hummingbird (really, really small) to blue whale (huge), and this sentence is killer:"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."
The first time I cried reading this was in the Clarence Dillon Public Library in Bedminster, NJ. I was 26 (3 years ago). The above line primed me for it, and trust me, I wasn't in the crying mood. I wasn't sad, I wasn't particularly nostalgic for anything, and I'd just gotten back from an hour or so of basketball in the late-spring heat.
It's the final paragraph that always wins me over:
"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, 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, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."
That paragraph has been read hundreds of times and not once lost its luster. The cadence and syntax are perfect, and it rises to eternal truths, each one registering with me in absolute and deliberate succession. This is the best essay I've ever read. I'm confident in making that statment.
During tomorrow's interview Brian will speak to the origins of this essay, so I'll leave them unspoken for now. Check-in tomorrow!
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