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Hi! I'm passing the message below on, in the hopes that someone might recognize its source:

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"We like to speak of one thing in terms o
f another thing; but what we'd really like to describe is something that is like nothing else on this earth."

I am 99% sure this comes from SOMEWHERE in VN's work, but it could be a short story, or a letter to Bunin or Khodasevich...I've scoured Strong Opinions, Speak, Memory, Boyd and all the other usual suspects to no avail. I'd just like to see the context in which it gets uttered -- he seems to be saying something like: the motive for all literary expression lies in metaphor, in yoking two unrelated things together to produce a new understanding (like, "still visible gleams from an already extinguished star," with "lines written on a postcard from" a deceased person -- in "Breaking The News," or icicles and exclamation marks, "The Vane Sisters," etc.) -- and yet perhaps the ultimate longing of the writer is to describe something with no basis for comparison, a unique Thing, incomparable, etc.

If you know of this quotation -- even if you recognize it from Paul Valery or
William Gass or John Updike -- I'd much appreciate a gloss.

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