Bach as stern teacher

I love imagining the Bach household. He and his first wife had seven children, three of whom died before his wife died. I think the story goes that he was away when she died, doing music, concerts of some sort with his boss and musical friend/partner Prince Leopold. He didn't know she had died until he arrived home. My sense of him is of a man full of passion and deep sensuality, a man who loved to hold his children on his knee, laugh with them, sing with them, teach them and demand a great deal from them. His first son was a composer but I believe he had some serious difficulties with alcohol and happiness. I'm sure it wasn't easy to be a son of Bach. With his second wife he had thirteen children, 8 of whom died in childhood. Don't believe for a second that each of those losses wasn't painful.
Today I felt almost as if I went backwards in my progress with Fuga 1. I only have one more day and then I'm supposed to go to the next Prelude and Fugue. Uh oh. I'm gaining so much from this one piece I can hardly believe it, even if I can't identify the function of every chord I am starting to hear the odd intervals and motion in my head, at random moments. The amazing thing is in the midst of these densely tangled spots come perfect rule abiding cadences. And he ends the piece with a lovely consonant heavenward thread resolving into a lovely C major chord. As if , nothing to it folks. It's only a fugue, what is my problem?
Speaking of heavenward...Here's an interesting passage from the Wolff biography:
Resembling the model of 17th c. scientific inquiry, Bach's musical inquiry demonstrates its results as it proceeds. His musical knowledge is invariably tied to his musical experience, as his compositions so amply manifest, whether canon, concerto, cantata, or anything else. And fully aware that Bach's music always invites one to discover "polyphony in its greatest strength" and "the most hidden secrets of harmony," Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach issued the warning that only "those who have a concept of what is possible in art and who desire original thought and its special, unusal elaboration will receive from it full satisfaction." ..Too full-blooded a performing musician, Bach would not have been interested in pursuing an abstract goal. Yet he definitely wanted his musical science understood as a means of gaining "insight into the depths of the wisdom of the world", reflecting a metaphysical dimension in his musical thought. ..... Bach's compositions...may epitommize nothing less than the difficult task of finding for himself an argument for the existence of God----perhaps the ultimate goal of his musical science..." p. 338 and 339
Today I just stumbled along. Finding all the tangles and doing my best to untangle and understand them. What univeral intelligence would provide for such amazing elegance, music, science, meaning.