Why follow the crowd?

I had what will surely turn out to be the nicest half hour of my week yesterday, when a fellow graduate student asked me to hold her three-month-old baby while she popped over to the library. I wandered round the ground floor of the department for twenty minutes singing to this delectable infant, and afterwards, as I stood talking to his mother, he fell asleep on me, which I regard as a something of a compliment as well as a pleasure. Luscious. My brother put my niece on the phone to talk to me on Saturday and she made very pleasing gurgles and squeaks, out of which the words "hello auntie" are surely only a few developmental months away. Some friends of mine in Britain have just announced that their first bambino/a is due in the summer; two engagements have been announced since I got back; I have been reading book 6 of the Odyssey; and I am corresponding with an old friend about the dress I will wear at her wedding in July, in which I am cast, perhaps presciently, as The Bridesmaid.
Meanwhile, I continue to eke out my fertile years in a dusty library, pursuing my studies. Studies in a completely obsolete verse genre. In an elaborately artifical literary tradition. In a proverbially long-dead language. Belonging to an ancient and long-extinct culture. And the subject of my investigations? Presentations of thwarted maternity. You couldn't make it up.