"We do not know for sure if this book was written in less time than it took to write this text which, as a prologue, wants and needs musicality to remain. Maybe it is because beauty has no end and our stubbornness makes us look for it, or maybe it is a whim, because books like this do not end at the end, but they begin. What we do know is that Luis Cruz-Villalobos is one of those writers who cannot write a single poem because he needs to write whole books. I do not say this because his poems are not pieces of craftsmanship or small organisms as complex as a space station or an ant, but because his creative capacity is not of this world. And what is from other worlds often makes us unhappy. And, as has always been known, unhappiness is but the other side of the coin called life. On the other side are the happy ones. I was saying that Luis Cruz-Villalobos is not from this world of poets that fight and move in search of a definitive poem. He is not of the race of those who sculpt until they die, until the marble is taken from their workshops while they sleep. It is not of those hunters who spend hours with their sights set on the place where their faith tells them that the defenseless prey will appear, maybe for a couple of seconds. He is the mammoth hunter, the one who comes out with a spear as weak as our bones in search of the meat by the ton. And he always arrives home with food. In his cave, they have never gone to sleep with an unhappy belly. Dedicated to the whole world and to the little gods -like Nicanor Parra-, this architectural complex called Theory of Unhappiness, and which, on the contrary, draws us to happiness as a landscape, is no other house than the embers that remain alive, hidden behind the gray of the coals, until the fire of the future. Perhaps that is all this theory is trying to tell us. Perhaps knowing that the fire hides -or sleeps, or rests- in the heart of the coals, of the mother or of our own heart, is enough to keep our unhappiness at the right temperature: so cold as to be happy and so hot as to make others happy. Here we speak of unhappiness but also of time, of questions to the dead, of bad and good poets, of a Roman emperor, of axioms, of our ancestor Alonso Quijano, of course of philosophy, of God, of how much would fit in our notebooks and our hands. Here, in Theory of Unhappiness, one speaks of what should be spoken of at schools, in parks, in fields, one speaks of life itself, as Cortázar said, defending himself. And it is these places, where we find life, where we shall have to stay and wait for death. But do not stand still and do nothing, because that, and only that, is the opposite to happiness. It says it well in one of the epigraphs of the book -those immortal verses of don Nicanor- and I say it well, now, on the point that poetry returns to give me warmth: Luis Cruz-Villalobos is there, so that silence does not grow crooked." Sergio Marentes (Prologue). AUTHOR: LUIS CRUZ-VILLALOBOS, PhD (Santiago de Chile, 1976). Writer, clinical psychologist and professor. Doctor of Philosophy (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Author of an extensive literary work in poetry, along with essays and academic papers.