Happy new year, dudes! Chronos has been pretty unkind to the human race these last couple years, and I don't have a lot of hope for that changing anytime soon, alas. Still, I'm trying to cast off the seemingly omnipresent pall of dread, not only because it's exhausting to live under, but lending it more weight than it deserves ignores the incontrovertible fact that life is not a static thing, but an endless cycle of change. Locking into one groove, be it positive or negative, may be comforting in its predictability, but it's no way to really live.
On to the 千字文.
鱗潛羽翔
lín qián yǔ xiáng
"Those with scales are submerged; those with feathers soar."
Not much to say about this one, either. We've got another typically terse observation of nature in which properties of the things being talked about—fish and birds—stand in for the things themselves: 鱗 is fish scales, and 羽 is feathers. I vacillated between the translation above and just saying "fish" and "birds," opting for the former mainly to present this explanation.
看官再見！See y'all soon.
微臣
史大偉
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