Talk:The Lathe of Heaven

message: "鈞" can be found as a component of 陶鈞 as "potter's wheel", rather than "lathe".
However. As we say even in the Lathe page: "Lathes can be used to shape pottery, the best-known design being the Potter's wheel" - so if there were potter's wheels, is that not a kind of lathe...? In Potter's wheel we have: "A potter's wheel may occasionally be referred to as a "potter's lathe""... 
Additionally, while going from 陶鈞 to 鈞 seems like you could just remove the "pottery" (陶) implication and simply write it as "wheel of heaven", that would be a mistake; simplifying it to "wheel" removes a great deal of nuance and adds incorrect connotations - 鈞 is not 'any wheel', it's not a wheel for going anywhere, but rather spins for the purpose of shaping. Destruction on heaven's "spinning machine which shapes creation" - well, it doesn't sound like it's *not* a lathe. 
In the Taoist monk Cheng Xuanying's commentary on this passage, he states that 天鈞 is the principle of natural balance. I found this in a Chinese language source: “天钧者，自然均平之理也”. Rather than literally translating it to a 'thing', be it potter's wheel or lathe, it seems like the truer translation is 'natural equilibrium'. Will look for English language source to use as I'm not a translator myself.
Fourday (talk) 14:43, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: 2024

message: Would it be worth mentioning that H. G. Wells wrote a short story on some of the same themes, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"? It's about a man who has the power to alter reality by wishing it. JHobson3 (talk) 13:01, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Not that similar.  And lots of other SF & Fantasy has used it.  --GwydionM (talk) 10:01, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Lathe of Heaven and H. G. Wells 

message: The summary needs work.  Some things, like the dream that turns everybody gray, are mentioned twice.  Also the long description at the beginning doesn't describe the "real world", just the current world that George has dreamed up.  We don't know what the "real world" was because we don't know when George's first dream was.  For example, he mentions dreaming his aunt out of existence as a teenager, and that predates the nuclear-holocaust dream 73.137.170.88 (talk) 04:56, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: See the past comments of "22:39, 30 May 2009" and "02:39, 7 June 2009" on Talk:The Lathe of Heaven/Archive 1... -- AnonMoos (talk) 04:50, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plot summary problems 

message: The older Wade-Giles version of the name was universal in the West at the time she used it.  I use the current form for the first reference. --GwydionM (talk) 07:54, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chuang Tzu or Zhuang Zhou 

message: Someone objected to the long-standing mention that she was "the late".
Style says that articles should not "dwell on the death".  
It does not.  Two words are used.  
And it had been like that since 3 June 2019, until someone decided to get extremist about a sensible guideline.--GwydionM (talk) 07:06, 27 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never seen the statement 'this author is dead' included on the lead to any other article on books, including other books written by Ursula K. Le Guin. the fact that it is included here, while not being included in the lead of her other books, is an unnecessary fact that does not need to be included in the flow of the lead. It might make sense if the book was first published posthumously, but it was not. I think that and the manual of style's guideline demonstrates consensus, and that an administrator should be contacted to prevent prolonging an edit war. Legofan94 (talk) 20:26, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'd see it as a helpful little detail, and in line with the actual guideline.  And don't you have anything better to do than try to uproot facts that are true and mildly useful?--GwydionM (talk) 07:52, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mentioning she is now dead. 

message: That's somewhat misleading, or at a minimum cryptically compressed -- he comes to the attention of Haber because he's caught taking a mixture of drugs (some technically illegal for him) in order to suppress dreaming, when dreaming is actually a necessary biological function, which can lead to very serious medical/psychological problems if suppressed.  Having a severe phobia of dreaming can be a very grave problem by almost any standard. AnonMoos (talk) 20:47, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with this comment in a literal sense. I do think the original sentence is likely true to the philosophical tone of the book 2600:8801:1B85:AA00:5826:7B06:37A1:9B7D (talk) 01:54, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: "Orr...is labeled sick because he is immensely frightened by his ability to change reality"

message: This idea comes from a book called Political Science Fiction by Donald M Hassler.  But the author says only that they think it means this, as well as either / or.  It was being presented as if it were a proven fact.
And as they say, every Tom, Dick or Harry is called George.
--GwydionM (talk) 15:53, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  George Orr and George Orwell