November is “Beethoven Awareness Month” at WQXR in New York, which means all Beethoven all the time online at http://www.wnyc.org/. Check it out, especially as you sit down to read your Hegel or your Wissenschaft des Judentums. Nighttime or daytime, it’s the same zeitgeist, stormy and gemütlich all at once. I took these pictures on a walk through the “Literary Walk” at the Mall in Central Park, a couple of weeks ago when the foliage was still up. I have since learned that the  lines that shape the Mall  are the only straight lines in Central Park designed by Olmstead and Vaux, whose own vision was neo-romantic. To understand the difference between romantic and neo-romantic is to understand something basic about the built-world and thought world which we inhabit.