“I was walking and thinking of you in Ojai, an open space of country, and suddenly I knew what wildness was.”

These letters were found among materials left by Pauline Gibling Schindler, the wife of the architect Rudolph Schindler. At the time of these letters, the Schindlers were separated. He continued to live in his own house in Kings Road, Los Angeles (now West Hollywood), and she was most frequently in Ojai, a small settlement some seventy miles north-west of Los Angeles, where she stayed with her young son Mark. When this correspondence starts, John Cage is 22 and Pauline Schindler is 41.