During their first week, members of Occupy Wall Street, the ideologically vague and strategically baffling effort to redress social inequities, put together a library on the north end of Zuccotti Park whose disparate offerings included “Last Exit to Brooklyn”; Gay Talese’s article in The New Yorker on the collaboration of Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga; and Abbott’s Digest of New York Statutes and Reports, Volumes 4, 9, 33 and 34. By the middle of last week, as the numbers entrenched in the park grew, copies of “Animal Farm,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” and “Meltdown,” a book outlining the 2008 financial crisis, were well placed. Specific ambitions still had not emerged, but a new intensity had begun to replace the limp theatrics.

The New York Police Department could not have intended to operate as a public relations arm for Occupy Wall Street, but its invidious treatment of the demonstrators last weekend went a tremendous way toward galvanizing sympathy for the group’s good but porous intentions. Video widely seen on the Internet of a high-ranking officer, later identified as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, attacking what appeared to be docile protesters with pepper spray prompted public outrage and investigations by the Internal Affairs Bureau of the Police Department and Manhattan prosecutors.

Early Monday evening, helicopters flew over Wall Street, in anticipation of what — excessively boisterous readings of Orwell? — was hardly clear. The group’s march on the financial district’s Luxury Night Out was still a day away. The Broad Street outpost of Hermès was in no imminent jeopardy.