Las dos o tres circunvoluciones cerebrales sobrantes

Las dos o tres circunvoluciones cerebrales sobrantes names a bitter paradox in the narrator’s account of human consciousness: a little more understanding brings not mastery but a sharper awareness of mortality. These supposedly surplus brain convolutions let a human being comprehend the vast universe and the richness of life, while making it impossible to accept that the knower must disappear without returning.

The Surplus as a Burden

The phrase first emerges from the narrator’s refusal to treat death as merely the need to rest. He says the worst prospect is not that life is short, but that after lying down he will never return to reality. A return to the Milky Way is not essential: he would consider another galaxy, provided it had at least one bar. Even his comic thought of reincarnation has conditions; he would prefer a being with two sexes, not a world where reproduction occurs by budding. The humor makes the underlying demand more vivid: he wants another chance to inhabit a world, not simply an abstract continuation after death.

The narrator calls the extra convolutions self-destructive. They turn against themselves, metaphorically biting their own tails until they bleed, and cannot be shed as a saurian sheds an attacked tail. Gin can anesthetize the implicated synapses for a few hours, but the relief is temporary and leaves the dilemma intact. The comparison makes consciousness both an evolutionary advantage and an injury without a bodily escape route.

Intelligence, Mortality, and the Angel

In a later exchange, the narrator says that a human has one or two convolutions too many because human existence is so brief. He distinguishes this claim from a measure of intellect: the angel does not have the surplus, yet may possess enough intelligence to accommodate concepts of the universe in which it will remain eternally. Its understanding suits its cosmic status; the human, by contrast, knows it is only visiting. The difference is not simply what either can think, but the mismatch between knowledge and the time available to a mortal life.

When told that the complaint arises because a convolution is superfluous, the narrator answers that the problem is emotional, even moral. The surplus makes him feel the unfairness of a short life and of having to say farewell to so many things. The exchange sharpens the expression’s irony: what sounds like an excess of reason is experienced as grief, while rational awareness itself keeps that grief active.

The Knowledge That Must Be Lost

The narrator gives the surplus a concrete scale by contrasting human knowledge with the life span humans share with chimpanzees, to which they are genetically close. He can conceive of galaxies and clusters, spiral arms, individual stars, planets, and asteroids; he knows about the Sun and Moon, the evolution of life on Earth, ancient Egyptian pharaohs and Chinese dynasties, and the peoples and countries of the present. His awareness ranges across natural history, cultures, religions, mythologies, languages, and etymological connections.

That inventory extends beyond impersonal learning. He knows hundreds of people in private life and could name roughly a thousand living compatriots from his small country, with detailed biographical knowledge of some. He is attached not only to people but to familiar landscapes, whose features he knows closely enough to notice a shrub cut down or a stone moved. Books have brought him knowledge of the biosphere and universe, as well as intimacy with fictional lives; music, from folk and Renaissance music to Schönberg and Penderecki, is another part of the world he will have to leave. The catalogue turns mortality into the threatened loss of particular relationships, places, works, and forms of attention.

Meaning and Limits

The expression gathers the narrator’s central conflict into a deliberately comic biological image. The convolutions are “extra” only in relation to the short duration of human life: they enlarge what a person can know without lengthening the time in which that knowledge can be lived. Unlike a detachable tail, this capacity cannot be cast off; alcohol can briefly dull it, but cannot resolve the contradiction.

The phrase therefore does not celebrate intelligence as uncomplicated progress. Its surplus produces an awareness of scale, history, attachment, and impending loss that the narrator cannot reconcile with a finite lifespan. Knowledge makes the world more particular—and makes departure from it more painful.