To be vindicated, to win the protracted argument, is perhaps one of our deepest and healthiest motivations – and, in a paradoxical sense, often our most tragic. Life, like a mighty rushing river, does not coalesce into fixed points and safe zones; it merely flows – taking everything along in it with no thought of direction, with no superior agenda, with no privileged spots.
To be right is to lose the privilege of contradiction, and to be vindicated is to beat oneself – so to speak – out of life’s eternal rhythms of flow, and onto the static river banks where we can only survive for a short while. Vindication lasts a fleeting moment. If to be wrong is life’s very music, then to be right is to fixate on a single hollow note at the expense of the entire rapturous score.
