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ere is a man stripped of much of what he thought of as his life. His son is dead, his work is gone, his mother fading, his daughter off at college and when they speak on the phone they have nothing to say. This summer, this fall, he seems deep in dream. He’s thick, this Daniel Bergoff: thick-jawed, balding, a chunky, strong man, a one-time wrestler, with body hair and long heavy eyebrows half gray, half black, not someone you’d expect to be a dreamer. A gorilla, dreaming? He’d been comptroller and chief financial officer for a high-tech company in Cambridge, someone more likely to think numbers and protocols than to take in light on barn and field and trees, not a candidate for revelations.

But for months now he’s been walking, walking and sitting, watching afternoon light playing on barn and field and trees and on the water of the pond, Walden Pond. Thoreau’s pond—well, hardly that, with its smoothed-out trails now railed off for handicap access, sandy beach and timbered steps, the hum of traffic on Route 2, but still full of beauty. He’s been praying from the siddur or sitting, eyes shut, watching the little monkey of the mind do its tricks.

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