Open Invitation Salon

When in Paris, come to dinner at Jim Haynes'--all are welcome, every Sunday of every week. For the past thirty years, this cosmopolite art ambassador has played host to thousands, with this sole purpose: to introduce people to people.

All he asks is the customary répondez s'il vous plaît, so as to assign your name to his exceptional memory, as he prefers effortless introductions. At a typical Sunday salon 50-60 individuals will feast and make merriment in Jim’s old sculpture studio. In summer, perhaps double that number will spill out into the garden. Friends cook by committee: this week a painter from Oslo, next, a philosophy student from Lisbon. Friendships are formed, marriages ignited, and babies born into the world because Jim Haynes simply believes we should know one another.

Bessie A. Stanley was right in her perception that success in life is the laughter, love, and enjoyment embodied in the person “who has filled their niche and accomplished their task; who has left the world better than they found it.”

The Southern U.S. may have impressed upon Jim Haynes its rich hospitality, and disarming drawl—its tell tale signs of place--but his roots, to be clear, cover the entire earth. “Like Tom Paine,” he says, “I am a world citizen. After all, all our lives are connected.”

To the nomadically inclined soon-to-be college graduate, this idea, coming from this man, looks as savory as Turkish delight. The “roaring” 20’s described in Hemingway’s "A Moveable Feast" seem to me, at 23, more like yelping—this age is too uncertain for such puffed up pride. Hemingway was certainly as homely an expatriate in Paris as Haynes is today, yet he remained an American there. Then, to be sure, at that time this country was a savior abroad. I have proudly proclaimed myself an “American” for the past decade—first and foremost. In sharing the collective values that go along with this stripe, I also recognize that I have complied these past years in an exclusionary form of humanism. If I am to invite, unconditionally, all people to my personal Sunday salon, how can I do so and still define myself by the Other that I am not?

An exponent to world citizenship, and therefore, a proponent of nation-building, might say that such a flight from nationalism, such a redefinition of what I recognize my “borders” to be (that is, to not recognize borders at all), is akin to a flight from responsibility--not taking the bad with the good. The literary critic Clive James makes this charge of Jorge Louis Borges, who adopted “the whole world as [his] country," in James' opinion, merely to deflect his personal compliance with the purges of the Argentine junta. Eratosthenes the Stoic, perhaps the world’s first world citizen, called every good man his fellow countryman. Yet, if we are to be true stewards of the world, if we are to accept the responsibility of our vast inter-connectivity, then we must accept the good with the bad. Like Jim Haynes, we must be unconditional in our tolerance, and burst open our French doors to all without exemption. Maybe it starts with the simple act of memorizing an exotic sounding name.

- Joseph Picha