This is an extended version of a fairly well-known quote from the essay “Paths in the Fog”, by Milan Kundera, published in his essay collection “Testaments Betrayed” (1993).
Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them — Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-John Perse, Giono — all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?
Mayakovsky’s blindness is part of the eternal human condition.
But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are. [p 240]
Earlier in the same essay:
But the conformism of public opinion is a force that sets itself up as a tribunal, and the tribunal is not there to waste time over ideas, it is there to conduct the investigations for trials. And as the abyss of time widens between judges and defendants, it is always a lesser experience that is judging a greater. The immature sit in judgment on Céline’s erring ways without realizing that because of these erring ways, Céline’s novels contain existential knowledge that, if they were to understand it, could make them more adult. Because therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century’s culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children [p. 234]