Picard and the Q

I was watching “Tapestry”, one of my favorite episodes on Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this episode, Captain Picard lay dying because of a condition he acquired when he got into a fight when he was young and rash. An omnipotent being called Q talks to Picard in this near delirium state and proposes to turn the clock back and give Picard a chance to correct things. Picard takes up the offer and by the end realizes that he would much rather have made the same choices and died than change anything in his past.

This nicely ties in with this quote from Terry Pratchett’s “Men at Arms”:

“That was always the dream, wasn’t it?  ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’?  But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t the you then.  You then was a twerp.  You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then.”

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