Summary

181-182: The Greek word pharmakon means both “poison” and “cure,” and Plato used it to mean everything from illness to paint. In one work, Plato calls the written work pharmakon and debates whether it aids memory or kills it.

183: Goethe also worries whether writing kills living things, but the speaker finds it generally changes nothing.

184-185: Writing is an equalizer: the reader cannot know whether the speaker has written any given proposition inebriated, sober, weeping, or even in any given order. Now even the speaker cannot tell. This is why writing feels more like necessity or killing time than hard work.

186-187: It is aggrandizement to worship a substance as a god. For that reason, French poet Apollinaire titled a book not L’eau de vie but Alcools. The speaker wonders whether elevating heartbreak to allegory is aggrandizement, since lost love is common...