On Bach and fatherhood

It's two lives, really. Or four, to be completely accurate, for Cleo is both a four-year-old preschooler and, by her account, a princess with modest magical abilities. But what I mean is this: at times, I'm completely given over to fatherhood - as this morning, when we played our fishing game and then improvised with her baby dolls, building spaces in which they could hatch secret plans, before taking most of an hour to sketch, with her, developing narratives about spaceships, burning houses and boys eating hot dogs. But at other times - as now, when Cleo and L. are in West Virginia and I'm at home in Baltimore - I'm a part-time academic, working through student essays and writing an introduction to an original translation of a 1741 French text on that year's Salon. How to reconcile, or marry, such divergent identities? Frankly, I don't know. And what's more, I don't know if I need to.

I suppose that one could seek a sort of common ground, allowing one identity or calling to bleed into the other. That, in a way, was the solution that J.S. Bach seems to have pursued. That great composer has been on our mind of late, as we've been listening regularly to a fictional account of his chats with a young American girl who is stymied in her own piano lessons. During their conversations, Bach occasionally mentions his children, citing them as both a joy and a financial burden. And that's likely about right, in his case: after all, he had 13 kids by his wife Anna Magdalena, and those in addition to the four he had fathered with a first wife, and who joined his growing brood in a Leipzig apartment. Consequently, as Hans Fischer has noted in a pleasant overview of Bach's life and career, Bach and his second wife seem to have run a rather frugal household. Still, by all accounts, it hummed; indeed, the Bach household seems to have been - well, to use a musical term, harmonious. And such harmony seems to have stemmed at least in part from Bach's ability to interest (and instruct) his children in his primary calling, music. Fatherhood, in some ways, was merely an extension of his natural vocation.

But even Bach, apparently, had a room of his own: a composing room, which looked our along the city wall toward the west. And perhaps it's there, in that room, that we can find a basic truth. Bach seems to have enjoyed fatherhood - and certainly I can't name many pleasures more simple or more rewarding than simply playing and drawing with Cleo. Nonetheless, it's evenings like this, in which I can let my mind roam and struggle with even more abstract and rigorous ideas, that refresh: that give me a sort of freedom, in turn, with which to give myself over to a game of fishing. One life, in short, creates a space for the other; the two, when it works, are complementary in the best of senses.

Cleo, of course, doesn't have 15 siblings, and I'm no Bach, especially in the realm of translation. Our pink house is no Baroque apartment, and Baltimore no Leipzig. In a very basic way, though, it feels fair, for the moment, to say that both Bach and I manage to live two lives, simultaneously - and to do so reasonably happily.