I just spent a few minutes looking at the photographs in the Nuru Project cache. Such speedy browsing, the blessing and the burden of the Internet. Bursts of color and place and moments. Flashes. Half-seconds of meaning. 

It's a simple exercise, one I encourage you to take right now, if you are reading this. Take two minutes. Click SHOP at the top of this page. When all the images load, slowly linger down the roll, only letting your eyes pause for a single second on each photo. Fifty images should take you about one minute. Once you do this, catch your mental breath then scroll back up the thumbnail roster and let yourself choose one image to click. Don't think. Just choose the one that pulls you most. 

I'm no psychologist. I'm a writer. But smart men have told me the two professions live on the same Jungian cul-de-sac. So, for the sake of this exercise, I'm going to describe how it worked for me. 

First, the initial run-down. I'll be honest, I cheated on the first row of images. Little crouched Poonam from India, letting the rain hit her sweet face, so trusting, reverent. You cherish her. Then, ticking by like a clock's hand: the diver, the red dress, the soccer silhouette. I'm lulled by a succession of black and white imagery; it's somehow slower. It's more stilled. Then, the bright day and three birds. And Christian Hansen's Haitian boy, more than a boy, chiseled and resolute, calm inside that crumbled moment. He makes me remember our girl Poonam, in the summer rain, from about 13 seconds ago. Then the long line of marooned monks, the simple table, the shaving yard: these feel like a new day around the world. The blurry celebration, the chalkboard, the wall, the water, the leaping, the surreal moment of purple surf. The viewing has momentum now, a forward movement I can't slow down, though I want to. I want to linger in places I imagine to be thousands of miles away. Rugged hills and Pacific atolls and houses of worship. Jungles, cities, mountain passes. Until my eyes settle on the last, a ripe blue of a wall, a dye blue that makes me think of Easter eggs. I am finished. And in the last possible instant, I see the girl, scratching out some white line. 

That was 60 seconds, a lush and powerful minute. I'm happily spent in the holiday feast sort of way. Yet, I am anxious to scroll backwards, knowing already what I want to see for longer. At least I think I know. 

I go up, passing the faint balloon man, the Bolivian shade tree, the five fisherman. I see my elephant sooner than I expected. Buoyant, childlike, but with a largess and tonnage you fear. That elephant. I can't not click it. Which is why I am so surprised to find myself clicking the other image, the one next to the bathing elephant. Thick woods, a trampled scene, and another set of creamy white tusks in the background. 

I click. 

It wasn't all that long ago that the first photograph surfaced into being. Can you imagine it? The scene. 1829. France. When the pewter plate began dissolving, like seltzer, and some vagueness took shape. They'd have used words like sunprint and camera lucida. Surely the early photographs took on the risen quality of a wonder. 

That's how this hesitant, curious elephant appears for me. He appears. He wasn't there, then he just was. 

Taylor Bruce is a freelance writer from LaGrange, Georgia and a Master's Candidate in the Brooklyn College MFA program. If you leave him alone in a room of bourbon and boiled peanuts, kiss them goodbye.

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