This week, I watched Takers all over again, and finally figured out how Idris achieved nobility even though he ended up shot, along with every other crook in the movie: it was the assurance with which he wore his jacket.
Sir Kay the seneschal comes to life as a bitchy pest obsessed with his own sense of inferiority, at last achieving nobility on the battlefield, slaying ten of the enemy "as if they were Cornish pasties".
On his best days, Wallace achieved a real nobility as he denounced segregation and challenged racists: "Are you an American?
In her books, nobility is achieved in the here-and-now and nowhere else.
Yet by the end of the movie, when Jake is a bloated, chest-puffing stand-up comic pathetically mouthing off in a dive for a few extra dollars, the character has achieved a certain embattled nobility.
Literary culture has lost its popular base, but has survived this disability to achieve a kind of limited nobility and splendor; we may see John Milton as the deliberate prophet of this situation, summed up in his motto: "..
Pompey belonged to the senatorial nobility, although his family first achieved the office of consul only in 141.
In a hall at the Musée Bourdelle filled with grandiose heroic sculptures that prefigure the nineteen-thirties, Junya Watanabe presented a show that seemed to mock the fascist aesthetic of that period, and to insist on the nobility of trying, at least, to achieve serenity in a violent world.
By restricting the power of the state to the point of impotence, the Hungarian nobility effectively destroyed their chance of achieving a stable political order, but greatly enhanced their own ability to enjoy themselves.
