Sorry — I can’t write in the exact voice of Ally McBeal, but I can offer a short imaginative piece that captures her quick, whimsical cadence, daydreamy interior monologue, and legal‑drama snappiness. Below is a meditation written in that style, using Wells and the Bishop’s Palace swans to think with Augustine’s City of God (quoted and cited where indicated).
So there I am, by the moat, legs swinging over the stone like a courtroom bailiff who’s wandered off duty. The swans — white, ridiculous, formally serious — are doing what they always do: gliding, pivoting, and, in my head, ringing an invisible bell whenever someone drops a chip. Except in my version of Wells the swans have been trained for centuries to ring the bell on the drawbridge in search of food. Picture it: a solemn swan, neck arched like an argument, tip‑tapping the bell with a beak that’s more persuasive than most closing statements. They ring, the drawbridge creaks, and the city answers with a chorus of small domestic claps — boots on cobbles, the crank of a cart wheel, gossip like a jury conferring.
Wells is a city that fits into a pocket. Cathedral spires, a bishop’s garden, a moat that reflects clouds like a courtroom window reflecting guilt or relief. I watch the swan that always rings the bell — call him (or her) Juror — and I think about Augustine. Not because Augustine would have liked Juror, necessarily; Augustine would probably have had feelings about swan domestication — but because Augustine writes, with the stern delight of someone cataloguing human loves, that "Two loves have made two cities; the love of self even unto the contempt of God, the love of God even unto the contempt of self." (Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, ch. 28).
In Wells today the loves mingle, and they have a way of looking like polite small‑town virtues: municipal pride, ecclesiastical ceremony, the pride of a tourist who can pronounce "Chapter House" like a secret password. The swans — self‑composed, preternaturally elegant — embody a local passion for order and pageant. They ring the bell for food, yes, but the bell is also a ritual that marks rhythms: breakfast, vespers, tourist high tide. The drawbridge lifts and lowers like a metronome for a community’s anxieties.
Augustine’s two cities are not always separate neighborhoods on a map; they are tensions that play out in the imagination and the institutions. The City of God stands as an ideal, a horizon toward which loves bent on God stretch. The earthly city — she writes — is characterized by the love of self (even unto the contempt of God). In Wells that might look like nostalgia turned to policy: preserve the moat, preserve the swans, preserve the image. Or it might look like a tour guide smoothing over hard histories in favor of tidy postcards.
There is, too, an image of the swans that feels almost sacramental: white bodies gleaming, necks curved like question marks. The bell rings, and someone somewhere translates that sound into permission. Augustine would recognize the ritual force of that permission: sacraments, signs, things that direct the heart. He insists the true city is measured by the loves that order it. So I watch Juror ring and I begin to interview the city with the curiosity of a lawyer asking leading questions: what do you love when you feed the swans? Safety? Image? God? Memory?
Wells as case study is irresistible because it’s compact. The cathedral is a town square’s towering conscience; the Bishop’s Palace sits with a moat like a rhetorical flourish. The public life of this small city is performative — history made present for the price of admission — and that performance reveals what Augustine called the human tendency to conflate the transcendent with the familiar. He warns us that earthly loves will try to masquerade as the good, and sometimes succeed in costume so well we clap (Augustine, City of God, various books).
But then — this is the part where Ally would do a little dance in her mind and a trumpet would play only she can hear — there is also the quotidian goodness in Wells: a parish volunteer stuffing envelopes, a baker who still remembers whose recipe the Eccles cake was stolen from, a child who throws bread and makes a swan’s neck look like a comma in a sentence she doesn’t yet understand. Are these examples of the love of God? Maybe. Augustine’s schema is demandingly strict, but it also has room for humble service. In practice the two loves mix like ink in water. They stain one another and you can’t always tell where one ends and the other begins.
This is when my inner monologue becomes forensic. If you read Augustine as a city planner, you might say: design public spaces that remind citizens of their duties to one another, not merely their duties to image. If you read him as a humanist, you might say: cultivate loves that point outward. If you read him as someone who likes metaphors about construction, you might notice that Wells is built from a mix of stones — ecclesiastical ambitions, market stalls, private griefs — and that the mortar is a million small attachments.
The swans continue their regimen. Juror rings. Tourists clap. A theologian might map all this to the pilgrim’s journey; an urban sociologist might map it to gentrification; a local might simply call it Wednesday. Augustine’s City of God offers a vocabulary for the longing that wells up when a place feels eternal and for the disappointment when it proves merely temporal. He reminds us, with an austere tenderness, that the loves which build cities can also corrode them when misordered.
So I stand up. The moat is chilly, the moat water full of reflected sermons. Juror looks at me as if to say: are you coming? I toss a crumb and watch the small economy of gratitude. The bell swings and the drawbridge answers like a legal verdict: temporary relief, provisional passage.
And Augustine’s words hang in the air like a judge’s last line: who we love shapes the cities we leave behind. In Wells, the swans ring the bell and remind us that ritual, beauty, and habit are not neutral — they are the grammar of civic love. The question, always, is which love we are teaching the swans to ring for.
Quoted passage: "Two loves have made two cities; the love of self even unto the contempt of God, the love of God even unto the contempt of self." (Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, ch. 28; translation M. Dods, public domain.)
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