From Philip French in the ObserverI learn (and haven’t time to check*) that the book on which this movie is based is itself a fantasy. In a way, it’s a double fantasy: it’s written by a man so obsessed by the stories about escape which took hold of him in the Gulag that years later he – still gripped by them – tells them as though true and happening to him. And for years people sort of believed his book.

We are not required to believe Peter Weir’s film. Part of its device is that when a tough new challenge is approached, often the characters advertise it, we expect it, and Weir then cuts ahead to its having been executed. Examples: how to cross the Gobi, really; how to cross the Himalayas, really.

A decent criticism of the film – and it’s been made, is that the characters don’t have a narrative arc of development related to the plot’s advancement. But why should it? maybe we are subtly being told that the characters don’t develop: they’re still back in camp.

* Sorry I have been absent so long. Events, dear boy, events. Perhaps this is why God invented RSS.

My Paris host booked me into the “Renoir in the 20th Century” show at the Grand Palais and I wandered round it early in the morning, quite alone, which was a great luxury. But the paintings, late in the master’s career, seemed gorgeous but fatally sentimental. They seemed to be the motherlode of French sentimental imagery. So it’s fascinating to see how the show’s creators make the case that Matisse (and plenty of other younger painters) were inspired by them?

I suppose the essence of the thing is that one can’t see old works of art with the eyes of the people who first saw them, let alone withthe eyes of innovative genius. The Rodin-Mattisse show was most revealing – helped one most see the connections – when it paired drawings by Rodin and Matisse. The surprise was that Rodin’s sketches had the same cartooning effect – the same flourishes and ellipses – as we are familiar with in Matisse’s work. That made them instantly recognisable and lovable. And Matisse’s little sculptures often seemed to be mimicking Rodin’s, and that gave pause for thought too.

It wasn’t until the end of the Renoir show that one saw (as well as Picasso’s) paintings by Matisse which were designed to show how there were echoes of the older man in the latter’s work. It worked: the reduction of a leg to a basic, vigorous bulge; the pattern of a fabric or wallpaper rendered as a suggestive smudge of colours. There are plenty of traits which Renoir plucked from the ether for the younger people to pick up. I trekked back through some of the Renoir rooms trying to reverse engineer some enthusiasm for the rather simian, stolid creatures with whom Renoir was trying to express something ethereal, fantastical, even spiritual.

I should perhaps add that the Rodin museum remains one of the greatest Parisian pleasures. The garden (entry one Euro) contains some splendid big Rodin pieces, including the Thinker. (They seem far more successful than most of the smaller pieces inside.) And it is one of the  loveliest public city gardens I’ve seen.

A big part of my duties is visiting an old monk who’s suffered double amputations and been moved to a local care home. It’s certainly an acquired taste, but I quite like visiting Frank. He’s in his mid-90s, has got no legs but most of the time does have his marbles. Sometimes he slips a cog, and that upsets him. But most of the time, he’s sharp and rather vigorous.

His seaside home has maybe thirty residents. When I visited another old boy there last year, it used to smell of pee, but it has become much sweeter. There’s been a change in the management. But it may be the luck of the draw with the residents.

One way or another, I’ve known several of these places, and I never knew one which didn’t field kind staff. It may be just him – released at last from a male world – but Frank especially warms to the female staff.  They seem to know how to be friendly but respectful. They know how to make physical contact, discreetly. And they seem to warm to him. It may seem odd, but he’s probably the liveliest of the residents.

But as we go through the sitting room, there’s an entertainer running a quiz. I notice one of the doziest residents bestir himself to slip out the answer to a tricky one. His voice is a little quavering  but perfectly clear.

I have been shuttling between Texas and New York in a curious dance between two rather different groups of people who share a basic spiritual – the old spiritual – dilemma. Roughly speaking, it goes like this. They want to get capitalism back on its feet. They feel quite guilty that it is enduring the present credit crunch and recession. They want to know what is required (not least of them) to make things work better next time.

That sounds like a problem for an economist rather than spiritual guru (they call me that, and that’s what they expect me to be). But they come to me – they say – because they are wondering what if anything is wrong with their values and whether “fixing” their values can help them fix the economy or feel better about America.

What I don’t do is the kind of meditationalism featured in Damages, where the murdering entrepreneur Arthur Frobisher decides to find himself in flowing white linen. I do recognise the new surge in business described by Jane Haynes, the psychotherapist whose “memoir of the couch” Who is it who can tell me who I am? has won prizes and is now being published commercially. But I don’t do psychotherapy either.

Rich people always expect society to beat them up about the luxury of their lifestyle and the aggression of their business techniques. My clients know from the rumour mill that I have a different point of view. I don’t expect them to change how they operate but I do expect them to examine what they hope to get out of what they do. I don’t let them waffle about family or society. I keep on at them about being sure they have examined what they really want for themselves.

Curiously, the group in Texas has resolved itself into a sort of reading group. A lot of its members are very, very rich though not as rich as they were a few months ago. But the leaders of the group are retired and have decided they want an open-ended discussion of great texts. The Great Writer approach is what they learned at school, in the American way. They like me around because they like strong chairmanship. They are often church people, and some are very right wing. Some are strikingly libertarian. Some say they have been too busy all their lives to think, let alone read.

The leader of this group is a canny man with great style. I fly business class when I’m working for him, and live in a lovely stand-alone house in his grounds. It was the granny house, but granny died. I can see where the geriatric equipment has been dismantled. It has a kitchen and I have a lovely black couple attending on me. Across the little artificial lake in the garden, I see the Big House. It’s all almost vulgar, but it is so frankly and cheerfully new and unpretentious, though vast, that only a great snob wouldn’t like it.

I’ll talk about the New York stuff next time.

So far as I can see, old men are the same whether they’ve spent a life in prayer or in banking. Obviously, some of them become ga-ga, and then – to be frank – their childhood years and memories are much more clear in their heads than the long decades they spent in psalmody. Even the most compus mentus of the old seem more direct than younger people are, and more direct than they used to be when they remembered that being circumspect is necessary whether in monasteries or businesses.

As piles or teeth or arthritic limbs caused them gyp, my elderly charges quite often muttered an audible and often quite basic Anglo-Saxon curse, and it was a pleasure to hear them do so.

It is a bit of problem to know whether the very nearly daft can be spiritual. Certainly, I have seen lots of courage and a lot more to admire in old monks as they face death. But I’ve seen wonderful quality in secular men and women too. But I am not clear which were the more spiritual. I think spirituality is a matter of living life (as Thoreau might have said) in a deliberate way. That takes mental strength.

It was always doubtful to me that the old promise of monasticism could honestly be made in our time. The old idea was that monasteries “were hard places to live, easy places to die”. It was presumed that a monastic life could be a sort of guarantee that unpleasantness and penitence now would be rewarded by a quick march into heaven. One of the reasons I left my monastery all those years ago was that I had great difficulty with both sides of this deal: I didn’t believe we had to do special suffering here and now to guarantee speedy bliss in the here-after.

I don’t, by the way, believe that these old boys wasted their lives by staying in the monastery I abandoned. I still believe that a life of prayer is valuable.

Did I love these old men? I am not sure that I did. But then, I am an ex-monk. I am not any more engaged on a mission to love the world. I am pretty happy to have done at least some of my duty, as I perceive it.

I joined my Benedictine monastery in the 60s as a young radical, a romantic, a seeker after truth. I return now as a “carer”. The community I left was never large and it still numbers about a dozen. A steady trickle of youngsters has joined, but most leave after a few months. Even amongst the older ones, there’s a bit of attrition as love of various sorts – or loss of faith – takes men away.

But how the old linger on! My community (yes, it is still mine) has some old boys who have been “old” for 20 years and more. That is, they have been somewhere between a bit weak and pretty well bed-ridden since the late 1980s.

I go back to lend a hand with these old timers every Christmas and New Year. Some of them have social services assistance, but the Abbot has the enlightened policy of sending some younger men home to their families for the holidays. This was unheard of in my day and is disapproved of by some even now. Anyway, it produces gaps in the housekeeping and personal care regime of the monastery and I go along and help fill them.

In case you are kind enough to wonder why I do this work, here’s the reason. Years ago I struck a deal with the monastery – I mean also with myself – that I would swap ordinary secular commitment for the monastic one. Though I lost my faith – or most of it – after I’d been ten years in the monastery, I still felt that my underlying commitment to lead an isolated, removed and devoted life should stick. It was partly a matter of honouring the commitment the monastery had made to me: they kept their part of the bargain, and I felt I ought to keep as much of my side as I could. That was compounded by the pain I caused my family by not being around for my own father’s last illness and death. I felt and still feel that my being away from him then created an obligation that I be available to other people in their hour of need.

In short, I am still some sort of monk.

Nothing has been touched or improved in this room for decades. Nothing has been added or taken away. There is the bare minimum of furniture and nothing on the walls. John Pawson would be proud of me.

I do watch satellite television: I had one installed in the communal sitting room of the retreat. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the documentary on the Prince of Wales the other night on UK TV. 

He is a wonderful and infuriating man. The royals have that extraordinary attention to detail. When the prince pinned a medal on a soldier’s chest, the details of the citation were clear in the royal mind. When he spoke to the soldier, it was as a father, a commander, an awe-struck fan – and almost as a priest. Charles was the state personified. And one realises that such moments are repeated day in day out.

Charles also embodies a perfect oddity in the human spirit. He could charter a large and rather vulgar yacht for a royal visit to the Caribbean and seem no more or less out of place on it than he did discussing the classically rustic hermitage to which he daily retreats when he is at home in Highgrove.

He and I could not be more different, of course. But we share a taste in boats and cells. 

The crew has gone ashore and will be getting drunk. It’s not often they can all leave the boat and risk mild incapacity. In normal times, they have to be ready to take the boat to sea at short notice. But here in the repair yard, the main engines have been shut down and all but immobilised. We have domestic supplies only. The crew call them “hotel” services. 

Normally, when the owner’s aboard, the place is all subdued bustle. When he’s not around, there’s usually someone somewhere playing music. Often several, almost competitively.

But now, all is still and silent. It was all dark until I put on a reading light to tap this out. It did me good to let the gloaming take over.  

I try not to wonder about myself and my tastes too much. It’s a waste of time. But a note in a radio schedule reminded me that next month is the 40th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s death in Bangkok.

It is unwise to blame any particular person for one’s desire to be a monk. But I would blame Merton if anyone in my case. The more I know about him, the less I am inclined to really admire him. But that is not remotely the point.

When I first read Merton as a very young man, he struck me as embodying spirtuality as it applied to young people who wanted to be both modern and devout. Even now, I can’t rewind my initial impression of him. An idea of him is lodged in my person and perception and won’t be budged. Similarly, I think he threw a switch in me, and I am pretty sure I can’t find it and wouldn’t flick it the other way even if I could.

What is so odd is that I remain in many important respects the monk he made me. I have lost most of my faith and changed some of my opinions. But I remain loyal to the idea of a solitary person risking everything to pursue one rather odd approach to taking life seriously and trying to be useful. I find the shape of Benedictine monasticism still fits me. It remains the history that I want to add another soul to. 

Fact is, I am hitching a ride as this behemoth plods in fuel-economy mode. We’re cruising under cloudy skies from its temporary lodging near my Balearic home to have some refurbishment done in my favourite shipyard at La Spezia. Yes, I know the yacht’s owner. But I know its skipper and crew better. I am – as so often – halfway between being a guest and a governess (to use old countryhouse terminology). I know the people at the yard too, and love to be around the craftsmanship they lavish (at huge cost) on the boats they service. This yacht is a vulgar monstrosity, but I have often very much enjoyed myself on board. When we arrive, we’ll see some spectacular, elegant, antique schooners of the kind favoured by old(ish) Italian money. I prefer those, but then I’m a snob.

Ah. Back to my young friend’s remark. I will get to it. Later.

In good times, I argued that one had to find grace in advantage. One had to become worth the good fortune that had been heaped on one. In bad times, one has to find grace in adversity.

Indeed, I am old school. I believe that the surest way to grace is through humiliation. Not everyone makes it by any means. Lots of people, faced with adversity, find only bitterness. That’s why we seek to diminish adversity: we’d prefer the problems it brings.

I’m not at all sure that one either is or is not tough enough for grace. I think many people can produce spiritual toughness. It’s like running – or what I’m told running is like. There’s pain and then pleasure, but the pain is manageable for most people, and the pleasure very real. Spirituality is like that.

I didn’t wish this recession on people, and I worry about those who won’t survive it. But then I accept that grace and spirituality – like toughness and courage – are not give to everyone. For the weak, only being loved by the tough is any use.