Now let us praise the Polish author Marek Hlasko, who committed suicide in a hotel room in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1969 at the age of 35.
When I started writing back in 1988 in Amsterdam, the first person who took my writing seriously was an older Polish lady who hardly spoke Dutch.
She listened carefully to my stories, and after a while she said, “Read Hlasko, you will like him.” I read him and loved him. The Northwestern Univerisity Press published his novella The Eighth Day of the Week in the U.S.
It is about a young couple in Warsaw in the Fifties looking for a place to make love.
I don’t know many authors who come as close to the meaning of despair as Hlasko.
But maybe despair is outdated. According to a professor in sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Mr. Ruut Veenhoven, we are only getting happier. He did research on happiness all over the world. The happiest countries are Switzerland, Malta and Denmark, with scores of 8.0. The U.S. is in the top list with 7.4. The Ukraine only has a 3.6.
According to Mr. Veenhoven, melancholy is a disease that can be cured. But if I have to choose between happiness and melancholy, I go for the melancholy. Boredom and happiness are sometimes indistinguishable.