Slow Looking 2026 | Proust’s Gallery | Ways of Looking
Last Tuesday I did my first ever Substack Live, and I was nervous about it in the way you are nervous about something you haven’t done before and can’t quite rehearse. Simon Haisell of Footnotes and Tangents was the ideal person to do it with: generous, genuinely curious, and someone whose own work I have learned from since I arrived on this platform. We have been in conversation since I joined his Blue Flower read-along last autumn, and in many ways that conversation is what led to The Reflective Eye existing at all.
It turned out to be one of those exchanges where you say things you didn’t know you were going to say and cover a lot of ground. Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.
On Attention Ecology vs Attention Economy
I’ve been thinking about attention for a long time, probably since I weaned myself off Instagram and realized how different it felt to be in a space where nothing was force-fed to me. The word that kept coming back was ecology rather than economy. An economy of attention extracts it, packages it, sells it back to you as engagement. An ecology cultivates it. It assumes that attention is something that can grow if you treat it properly, that it has seasons, that it needs quiet as much as it needs stimulus. That distinction felt important to me before I could fully articulate why.
The conversation with Simon helped me articulate it. What we are both doing, him with his read-alongs and me with the monthly artist arcs, is closer to ecology than economy. We are not competing for the loudest moment in the feed. We are trying to build something that rewards return visits, that gets richer the longer you stay with it. Whether that is sustainable on an algorithm-driven platform that is moving faster and faster is a real question. But the human instinct and impulse behind it feels right.
Because after a while I started to become aware of the writing that is a click-bait disguised as a literary insight. Often, very well disguised so that one might not even be aware they are reading something that is geared towards a provocation engineered to generate comments rather than thought. It is a real shame when that becomes the gravitational pull of where attention goes. It helps to ask yourself after you have engaged with the text: how has this actually helped me grow intellectually? Or was I just stirred emotionally in a way that has no regard for my intellectual wellbeing? Have you noticed that sense of emptiness you feel after engaging with such content? That is the attention economy at work and it is a life-diminishing experience if you ask me.
Substack as a Paratext
The other thing that came up was Genette. I’ve been slowly reading his Paratexts that map everything written around a text: the preface, the dedication, the cover, the footnotes, all the material that frames how we read before we even begin.
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Genette’s argument is deceptively simple: a text without a paratext, he writes, does not exist. Everything that surrounds a text, the title, the preface, the cover, the footnotes, the dedication, works to make the text present in the world, to ensure what he calls its “reception and consumption.” These thresholds are not incidental and they shape the reading profoundly. Philippe Lejeune, quoted by Genette, goes further: a paratext is “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”
Genette is careful not to claim that readers must be conscious of these framing devices to be affected by them. His point is quieter and more unsettling: people who know about paratexts read differently from people who do not, and anyone who denies the difference, he says, is pulling our leg.
What I kept thinking during our conversation is that the Substack ecosystem has become a paratext in this sense. The notes we write, the comments that accumulate under a post, the connections between writers, the read-alongs that run alongside a book, all of this is now part of how we read. We arrive at a book or a painting already shaped by the conversation that has been building around it on Substack. We are collectively building a reading apparatus around the texts without quite realizing that is what we are doing.
Discovery Voltage
And then there is discovery voltage. I use this phrase to describe that electrical feeling when two of more ideas that seemed unrelated suddenly connect and your brain sees something it couldn’t see before. It happens when I’m writing and a source I pulled for one reason turns out to illuminate something I hadn’t expected. It happens in the comments when a reader brings something I hadn’t considered and the post becomes more than what I wrote. It is what I am chasing, honestly, every time I sit down to write, never the finished argument but more importantly the moment that current of discovery voltage runs through.
Wonderment
Simon brought up the idea of wonderment during our conversation, and I haven’t been able to let it go since. He described it as a mixture of awe and respect and appreciation, the state you are in before the categories arrive, before you know how you are supposed to talk about a painting or a book. Simon put it in terms of Tolstoy: the lofty skies of Andrei Bolkonsky, or his gnarly old oak tree, those separate moments of recognition that slow reading produces and that then migrate into how you see your own world. The problem, as he put it, is that we get stuck in a silo, a vocabulary, a way of approaching things, and somewhere in that process we lose the initial freedom of just sitting with something and letting it go wherever it goes. What Substack has allowed, for both of us, is a way back to that, a way of recovering the permission to be genuinely surprised by what we are looking at. What a wonderful way to connected to yourself, to your own experience, to the life you are actually living rather than the one you are scrolling past. That is not a small thing.
If you think your option is missing form the list above do let me know what is it that brought you to slow reading or slow looking. Perhaps you have a question or an observation you would like to share. It would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Thank you Jörgen Löwenfeldt, Deborah Parkin, Lucy Hearne Keane, Gail Marie, Vera, and many others for tuning into live video with Simon Haisell!
The Reflective Eye exists because of conversations like this one. It started as a hunger for the kind of thinking that happens when you stay with art or novel long enough for something to actually shift. That is what Simon and I were both circling here. April is Edward Hopper month of slow looking. Four essays, four weeks, one painter. The first post is free and live now. The deep dives follow for paid subscribers.
