In what ways could Wallace’s theory about education be applicable to the writing of Alice Munro? Justify your conclusion.

The ability to see beauty in what is often overlooked is something both Munro and Wallace have in common.

In his essay, ‘This is Water’, Wallace discusses humans’ inability to understand their “most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities.” People over indulge in abstract realities, they often find themselves living their whole life in those abstract realities rather than in the real world. By abstract realities, I am referring to the pessimistic voice inside all of our minds, the ones we fail to ignore. Humans live their whole life seeing through the ‘water’, yet failing to acknowledge its vitality. We do not think of what lies in the heart of living: it is coming to terms with the fact that there are individuals other than ourselves in this world struggling and trying to survive in their own way. To live in serenity, we must learn to feel for one another and we must learn how to coexist. Wallace’s educational theory is that the liberal-arts cliché about ‘learning how to think’ is one that is far too often trivialized. Do not become “a slave to your head” and learn how to truly think for yourself. Wallace reminded me that despite having spent the majority of my life in a classroom, I have yet to learn how to think, how to truly think for myself.

Wallace’s prominent theory in his essay is that true freedom is acquired not from knowledge, but rather from being able to exercise control over how and what you think. We must acknowledge that the world does not revolve around us (as individuals). If this is not achieved, we will become slaves to our own thoughts and to the thoughts instilled into our brain by others. One’s inability to connect to other people enables feelings of isolation and depression to burgeon. Wallace states that to live a happy life, we must be able to connect with people through interpersonal intelligence: the ability to connect with other people through verbal and non-verbal means.

Munro and Wallace alike see the value in interpersonal intelligence. Munro’s writing, although anti-climatic, enables the readers to build emotional connections to her characters: empathy, sympathy and compassion. At the core of Munro’s short stories is the study human psychology. Like Wallace, Munro sees beauty in human relationships. In his essay, Wallace provides his reader’s with the grocery store anecdote, saying that spending an afternoon in a crowded grocery store is tedious to many of us. We begin to blame others for our misfortune. However, he states “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.” Similarly, Munro crafts stories such as ‘Passion’ in which the plot is far too enigmatic to be fathomed without a basic understanding of emotional intelligence. Munro creates  the character Grace: a young woman who builds her relationships solely on the need to satisfy her emotional needs, making them susceptible to a tragic ending. Munro enables the readers to live in the character’s mind. The readers become sympathetic towards Grace’s character and despite her sinful acts of emotional infidelity and her selfish actions, the readers see how her family history has impinged upon her personality. Munro enables the readers to see the world in colour: life is not in black and white, people are not distinctly good or bad. Every aspect of living has a different fusion of good and bad, yet it is easy for us the see the bad and overlook the good.

One must be aware of their internal state of mind, there is no doubt that humans must be emotionally stable in order to lead a successful life. However, emotional intelligence is just as important. After all, we are social beings and in order to secure the void we develop in isolation, we must learn how to connect with others and truly think for ourselves.

The importance of emotional intelligence in our lives has been emphasized by many philosophers. Aristotle famously stated “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” Furthermore, Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri, an Arab poet and philosopher once said “الناس للناس من بدو ومن حضر  …  بعض لبعض وإن لم يشعروا خدم”  meaning that humans are naturally social beings, and thus they must set their social and political differences aside in order to coexist. Humans must be able to empathize with one another, they must be able to understand that the world in which they live is not their own.

Emotional intelligence is an ostracized ability. It is a universal language, enabling us to feel in tune with all of humanity.