He* collected moths as a kid in Ithaca.

He collected 
the moths 
in the woods 
near Cornell.

This one's named after a sphinx, Pandora Sphinx moth. 

“They were individuals to me, without character but with sharp outlines in my memory, and always the Latin name: Apatelodes torrefacta, the Spotted Apatelodes moth, which always looked battered; Olceclostera angelica, the Angel Moth, like a Victorian woman in gray mourning; Eumorpha pandorus, the magnificent Pandora Sphinx moth. Those are names that still conjure trembling shadows projected by my flashlight, sharp cold evenings in pine forests, long bicycle rides to forests we’d secretly sugared.” 

"skein of evanescent allusions" (26)

"diaphanous veil" (6)

“I walked through woods soundless as a ghost. The delighted eye of my memory regarded one thing and then another.” 

“A ghostly profession, catering to ghosts, but in a grand style, referring to art criticism” (10).

“My own list of most-interesting [art critics] includes Joseph Masheck, Thomas McEvilley, Richard Shiff, Kermit Champa, Rosalind Krauss, and Douglas Crimp, but I doubt they are a canon in anyone else’s eyes, and the cloud of names behind them threatens to become infinite: Dave Hickey, Eric Troncy, Peter Plagens, Susan Suleiman, Francesco Bonami, Kim Levin, Helen Molesworth, Donald Kuspit, Buzz Spector, Mira Schor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Miwon Kwon, Germano Celant, Giorgio Verzotti—there are hundreds more” (8).

A place to draw the curtains and write. 

He becomes professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989, where he teaches today and acts as chair of the department. 

“[Artists] have idiosyncratic, oblique, eccentric, unpredictable, a-historical, and just plain crazy uses for history. That experience was the beginning of the end of ordinary art historical pedagogy for me.” 

“Only short books are sane, people are safe with short books. Writers can control them, but all books are slow-acting poison, they are infected by the author’s mind, and they infect readers in turn, and the longer the book, the more time you spend turning the pages, whether you are writing or reading, the more ill you become. No one controls thoughts that take more than a hundred pages to write. Many books appear to be sane, but that is because they end quickly. Most people seem sane if you talk to them for just a few minutes” from A Short Introduction to Anneliese, 2025, by James Elkins, the second book in a five-part novel, titled Five Strange Languages.