Voluntary Oasis
Postscript No. 17 | Declan Rexer on Deep Springs
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What is morality? What is governance? What is modernity? What do we owe to nature? How should we learn? What makes a life of service?
These are, in many ways, the essential questions of youth — of the examined and serious life. They are the questions that preoccupy the 20-something students who work and study at Deep Springs College, a cattle ranch and two-year university in eastern California, infamous among those who know it for its self-governing pedagogy, hands-on labor, and precocious pupils. Every few years, Deep Springs re-enters the collective conscience through a media report, usually positive, expounding on the virtues of this elite, remote, and oh-so-un-modern institution.
The instinct to apply to such a place — to know about it to begin with, to write the tens of essays required for admission, to volunteer for the toil and extremity the college entails — in itself reveals an intrepid spirit. Indeed, the many friends of The New Critic who attended Deep Springs are precisely attractive for their commitment to ideas and experience, their refusal to submit and conform to standard practices, and their monastic devotion to good and moral living.
But what happens when one strays so far from the modern things? How can one then return to our material and political reality fulfilled and satisfied?
Almost all the Deep Springers we know seem to be suffering from the affliction of their extraordinary education. The ideals are too right, and so they are too heavy. College is only temporary. Does that make Deep Springs an avenue for liberation or imprisonment?
What follows is a conversation between Declan Rexer and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Declan’s essay, “Not New York,” which interrogates that dreaded question imposed on any college senior: “Where will you be next year?”
Our conversation — on the unwritten rules of Deep Springs, The Graduate, Konstantin Levin, playing cowboy, tossing manure, getting animal guts put in your bed, birthing calves, killing gophers, and power couples — has been edited for length and clarity.*
*You can access the entirety of Postscript — this conversation in full, new weekly installments, and the complete archive of our gen z interview series — for only $30 a year.*
ELAN How did you find out about Deep Springs?
DECLAN When I was in high school, I had a couple of friends who took pity on me and my weird, nerdy high-school-boy ways. They referred me to an old friend of theirs who had just come back from Deep Springs and had transferred to Columbia University. But he didn’t have a phone, and he was sort of hard to get a hold of, so I was told I just had to show up at The Hungarian Pastry Shop and look in the back corner for the guy wearing flannel who smelled bad, with a couple books in front of him, and that would be him.
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