Sine lege vagatur

From the Letters of George Kennan

... Perhaps it would interest you my dear Coz to know what a sojourner in this dismal country misses most, for what he feels the most intense longing. It is not as you might imagine the marginal comforts of life such as a comfortable house, a warm fireside, or a good dinner. These things or the being deprived of them is a mere trifle. I miss most Music and conversation. I never before realized how essential both are to life and I never knew how deeply I loved music until I heard last summer the brass band of the Russian Corvelle "Varag." We had gone on board of her in the evening and were waked most unexpectedly on the following morning by the strains of "Hail Columbia" from the powerful band of twenty pieces. We were all fairly electrified, and hardly breathed until the martial air was ended and the instruments took up the softer notes of the prison song in "Trovatore" the music dying away over the still waters of the gulf and the louder passages echoing faintly from the high bluffs of Matuga.
Never before had those bluffs sent back the airs of "Trovatore and Rigoletta" and they probably never will again. I believe last winter I would have travelled on dog sledges five hundred verst to hear the Corvettes band play the Faust March, The Anvil Chorus, and some of the beautiful airs from Martha. That day on the "Varag" will long be remembered as a white day in my dreary calendar. When we left the vessel and she steamed slowly out her band playing "Ever be happy and blest as thou art" I confess I felt a choking sensation in my throat and as the waving caps on her quarter decks could no longer be seen we all turned away with gloomy countenances and silently turned our faces toward that dismal lighthouse feeling bluer than we had for many a long month before. You who live in a land of society and music do not realize what blessings you enjoy. Travel for two months as I did last winter with a band of dirty savage Koraks over the vast snowy steppes between Ghijiga and Anadyrsk without a soul to talk with and never once hearing your own language, live for a week or ten days in a black cold smoky underground hut without books with no society save that of two or three old Korak women, and with a howling snow storm raging outside and see if you wouldn't change places with almost anyone in the world.