It is perhaps excusable to recall with a touch of envy the time when a teacher could, without embarrassment, distribute The Lifetime Reading Plan or some such guide to literacy, and expect students to measure their progress toward adulthood by the number of checks beside the titles read. There is a certain comfort in the authority of lists. But, however reluctantly, one must concede that it is a better measure of maturity (in a teacher as well as a student) to know that we shall not soon have such lists again. The idea of the classic, if it is to be saved at all in our relativistic time, seems to need continual rescue from the idea of the absolute.