“EKa Is Sick of EKa”

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's obsession about youth and the effects of aging. In 1926 he wrote to Wilhelm Stein that he knew well of the “crisis of the thirty-year-old.” In 1939, he regretted that he was putting on weight as a result of his age (he was forty-four). His continual joking about dying at the age of fifty-six contained an element of memento mori, and when he outlived that year and turned sixty in 1955, his concern with age became a fixation. Just two weeks after his sixtieth birthday he referred to his “senility,” a term he then changed to “senile delinquency.” But this does not mean that he did not have his enjoyments and active engagements. In his later Princeton years until his death at age sixty-eight Kantorowicz led a very comfortable life.