To translate our innermost feelings

The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the bushes adjoining Montjouvain, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation. Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.

Well there is a central conceit stumbled upon right here. On the one hand Proust the writer here affirms we human beings largely express our deeper feelings in a blurred, blurted out form, a form which more or less hides their true nature from us. One might agree or disagree with this, but typically his assertions come at the end of such thick sentences that the reader feels inclined to agree just to get on with it. But Proust the narrator is also hereby staking out his territory: this crazy-long book that you have merely one portion of in your hands is his effort to do otherwise--that is, to translate his innermost feelings in a more complete and persuasive way than "we" otherwise manage to effect. Many many pages from now, we will see how he has done.