they come to set you free
Sadness is not real, Moritz has decided. It is artificial, created by the demons so spoken about in church every Sunday. Sadness is a disease, a mental wrongness that leads on to believe there is some sort of cure.
He laughs harshly. There is no cure. Happiness is a place and time in the past that cannot be reached for all the money in the world. Moritz knows now that it doesn't matter how much he studies- he is afflicted by this illness this constant gloom and forbidding paranoia. Death is the only reasonable escape and in no way can it be any more painful than sorrow.
Moritz pulls open the drawer in his father's desk shakily as the wood rattles in his clenched fists. Out comes a dark pistol. The answer to all this madness. He hurries outside, his strides long, boots pounding against the dirt. The devil has possessed him but in the settling twilight of that April evening, the demons shall let him go.