Abstract
We can imagine many of our emotions in our family pet: hunger, fear, anger, lust, and even the bonding that we call love. But not the appreciation of a sunset, sonnet, musical passage, or good joke. Mechner takes on the gamut of such aesthetic appreciations, removed from the urgency of the primal ones, and gives us the first thorough attempt at a behavioral explication. Because he has been so thorough and apt, my commentary can add little value to his thesis, only subtract from it. Therefore, rather than critique, I exemplify, and then simplify. By reducing his voluminous report to two lines: a theorem and an equation, I thereby encapsulate aesthetics in a sweet pill of spire. Aesthetic appreciation of this note may require a willing suspension of disbelief.