Even in the best of fatherly relationships, there is a strange chasm of otherness. The late poet John O’Donohue poignantly observed that to know one’s father, one must set out from the initial comfort and belonging of one’s mother to encounter the other in one’s father. This is especially a challenging journey for sons, who, to learn the meaning of their existence as men, and the possibility of someday taking up the mantle of fatherhood themselves, must “journey outwards, across space to find the father…. Regardless of how open, loving and gentle the father is, the child can at best only draw alongside an enclosed world.”

What might François Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mystérieuses” say about fatherhood.