CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Alive to those suggestions of a mysterious sphere of being that come to the man who of a night has watched the pearly grey of the weather-gleam. From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.
A sense of the supernatural and the weird, bound up with a mysterious feeling of limitlessness and indefinitude that haunted him in his thoughts about this world and our earthly life. The forms of another mysterious world, very near to this earth of ours, were seemingly present to his imagination. From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.
"A bit of mica glimmering in a crevice of the pavement suggests its story of the many feet that have passed over it; the tiny wildflowers peeping through the lush grass along a forest pathway whisper intimate secrets of the woods; a cobweb spun within the belfry of an old church reveals its mysterious hieroglyphs." —Jessie Lemont, "The Fairy Folk of Dugald Stewart Walker," The International Studio, 1914