Back in my youth, when I used to scan the help-wanted ads in the newspapers—remember them?—in search of some occupational niche where a restless teenager might scare up a bit of income, I would often see positions with titles that were utterly obscure to me. What, I wondered, did an “Imaging Specialist” do? What skills did such a job require? Did one need to have a particularly febrile imagination, or great drawing skills?
I could go on, although more examples would only underscore how embarrassingly little I knew of the world of work—or the world more generally. But no job title was more baffling to me than this one: “Heavy Closer.” What on earth could that be? I conjured a mental picture of a beefy man, like an old-style bouncer or professional wrestler, who had the proven ability to…well, to close things. But what things? Doors? Overstuffed suitcases? I had no idea.
I would have had greater clarity if I could have jumped ahead a couple decades and watched the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross, and particularly a deservedly famous scene featuring Alec Baldwin playing a true heavy closer. A thoroughly vain and repulsive fellow, Baldwin’s character swaggers into a real-estate office and gives a bullying pep talk to dispirited salesmen that climaxes with the admonition: “A. B. C.… Always. Be. Closing. Always Be Closing!!!” We get it: Closing here means finalizing a deal, doing whatever it takes to get the customer to “sign on the line which is dotted.” Never taking “No” for an answer.
Well, that’s one sense of closure. But there is a different usage that has become increasingly common. It refers to something psychological. Closure has become the word we use to describe that elusive sense of finality or resolution that comes to us, if we are lucky, after a painful or difficult experience, such as the death of a loved one, a divorce, the end of a romance, a professional failure, or the like. This sense of closure denotes a state of completion, a concluded healing of a wound, a finishing of the circle. Closure offers itself to us in the shape of a demi-nirvana, a liberation from suffering, whose achievement means that one has closed the door on the past, cabined it for good, put paid to it, consigned it to oblivion’s undotted line. One is back in control and can move on to the next chapter of life.
It sounds good, especially to those of us who are burdened with near-unbearable suffering, with a misery in the pit of the soul that never goes away, as is the case for, say, the parents of a long-missing child, for whom the discovery of their child’s body offers the prospect of at least something like closure. But we use the term far more promiscuously today. So much so that it compels one to ask the question: Is closure possible? Or is the goal of closure an illusion? Or, worse, is the striving for closure a mistake, a pursuit of an unworthy goal, which sacrifices something of our humanity in the process? After all, we are historical beings who never entirely cease to be what we have been. Even Jay Gatsby never stopped being James Gatz, much as he sought to close that door and re-create himself in his own Platonic image.
In an interview quoted in The Guardian, the novelist Paul Auster, who has since passed away, exploded at the very notion of closure, which he disparaged as “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of.” Instead, he asserted that the starting point of his own literary work was the astounding experience, at the age of 14, of seeing a boy at summer camp struck by lightning and killed. “I’ve lived with that thought ever since…you never get over it.” He came to see that traumatic experience as a principal source of his creativity, “the essence of what I’ve been up to all these many years.” It taught him to see that the seemingly placid order of his suburban New Jersey world had been, as Melville’s Ahab might have put it, a pasteboard mask.
A more powerful response, in a similar but far deeper vein, came from the philosopher George Santayana, in a remarkable letter he wrote to his friend Iris Origo, née Iris Cutting, in May 1933, on the death of her beloved son. It deserves to be quoted at length:
We have no claim to any of our possessions. We have no claim to exist; and, as we have to die in the end, so we must resign ourselves to die piecemeal, which really happens when we lose somebody or something that was closely intertwined with our existence. It is like a physical wound; we may survive, but maimed and broken in that direction; dead there.
Not that we can, or ever do at heart, renounce our affections. Never that. We cannot exercise our full nature all at once in every direction; but the parts that are relatively in abeyance, their centre lying perhaps in the past or the future, belong to us inalienably. We should not be ourselves if we cancelled them.…
I don’t mean that these abstract considerations ought to console us. Why wish to be consoled? On the contrary, I wish to mourn perpetually the absence of what I love or might love.…
I’m not sure that many of us are prepared to receive such counsel. It does not offer the promise of a heavenly reward, although it doesn’t deny that possibility either. Nor does it provide us with the stark assurance that what is gone is gone forever, and one should therefore move on quickly, gathering what rosebuds the dwindling years ahead may have to offer, and above all closing the door on the painful past.
Instead, it seems to offer a grief-stricken mother this advice: Never Be Closing. It is hard but beautiful advice. Although it has this in common with the adage of the heavy closer: It means never taking “No” for an answer.