My own take on Treadwell and his 12 summers among the bears in Alaska is similar to Herzog’s. I feel that Treadwell on some fundamental level had sentimentalized nature and thought that he could be one with this brute force. In reality, he had to keep some measure of distance at least during the rougher times of years when the bears were less likely to be as non-interested in Treadwell as they were in the summer when food was plentiful. For a hungry bear, Treadwell is not a friend but a source of food. Unfortunately that is the reality.The opening shot of Timothy talking to the camera and describing his manifesto displays his lack of maturity and his own ego. He is often grinning out his own perceived greatness and poeticism and he gets excited about his love for the bears and his feeling of kinship with them. It is almost as if he is overwhelmed by the environment, the scenery, the beauty, and the nature that he loses a proper and grounded sense of himself. He seems very naïve to me at the beginning of the film, and without even having had any knowledge of the film or what would happen to Timothy I felt immediately a strange foreboding as though I knew he was going to die. It was like in his romanticizing of nature, he was bound to meet his doom.

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Wittgenstein’s...

Even in nature among the trees and the sky and the clouds there is a language. Maybe this sounds romantic too, but it seems to be true. There is a language in the world that is universal—and, yes, it is poetic. I believe it is the “peace” that T. S. Eliot describes in The Wasteland—the peace that passes all understanding.
I think this peace that passes all understanding is what Wittgenstein is getting at. Language helps us to communicate on a number of levels: we can express need, or we can express ideas that have meaning for us. But at some point, language cannot do anymore. We are still left at a great expanse—like standing at an immense prairie or on the edge of a beach with the wide ocean spread out before us. That is like the gap between us and the object that we seek to know. So even if we could communicate with a kind of mythical beast (the lion—the king of jungle), it makes sense that we would still not understand the thing we are talking to, just as we still do not understand one another or who we are ourselves.

Language can be used to make sense of the world and of our lives—but that sense is only one level of…