Whether Timothy Treadwell would have ever considered himself a transcendentalist or not, we’ll never know, but Werner Herzog paints him as such in his film Grizzly Man. Herzog took pains, through editing, to present us with a man who followed his heart, over his head, into nature as he rejected society in the pursuit of the deeper truths he thought he could find through life with the bears. Like the darkly romantic and anti-transcendentalist Herman Melville, Herzog himself seems to reject this view, finding in nature not transcendent beauty but only hunger, chaos, and death.
The way Timmy saw nature was that is was wonderful, that it could harm him but if he showed who was the boss, nature would leave him be. He envied the way bears lived, how they ate, slept, played and even went to the bathroom. As said in the transcript of the movie Grizzly man Timmy says this,”I live here. It’s very dangerous. It’s really dangerous. I run wild with the bears. I run so wild, so free. So like a child with these animals, It’s really cool. And it’s very serious. This is closely compared to what Emerson has to say about nature,”Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort all her secrets and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature ever became a toy to a wise spirit.”
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But in comforting himself he tells himself this,”I’m here alone, and when you're all alone. You do get….you get lonely. Oh,duh right? You get pretty lonely. Oh, no. I’m gonna do all this stuff because I’m supposed to be alone.” Yet again Emerson has the same idea but he goes about being lonely differently. “I am not solitary while I read and write, but if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.” They both favor the idea of freedom in nature but know that when being alone, you can become