But for more and more contemporary versions of this noble wine, the answer is a definitive no.
As struggles go, that's not especially noble, and the answer I usually give, when cornered, is that I took my pen name for no reason at all.
Thursday's concert set up elements that were carried over into Friday's: "L'Ascension," shimmering and deliberately noble; Ravel's concerto, answered in "Turangalila's" solo piano line; and Saint-Saëns's monumental "Organ" Symphony, a work akin to "Turangalila" in its ambitious scope.
Only a person who had lived an extraordinarily noble and healthy life, he answered — only an Übermensch, understood as one who overcomes the rancor and resentments that lead us to squander our days.
What makes "Solar" such a noble nullity is that it answers these challenges so easily, with such a quotient of stress-free mastery that they feel less like challenges than like problems in a literary exam the author has devised as a means of proving his own prowess.
But still, there is something about Puddleglum's answer that represents a noble suspicion of what is asserted as established and uncontestable reality by intellectual elites.
For me, the answer lies in the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
In a section of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche once again answers the question, "What is noble?", this time as follows: "It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank…: some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost.
Bill Keller (column, June 14) writes, "Routing tyrants is a noble cause, but where do you stop?" The answer is, You stop after totalitarian regimes have been toppled.
This vision of the hermit as a noble rebel not so much above the law, but answering to a higher one has a seductive appeal.
