Reyes Pro was baptized in the same baptismal font in which Bécquer was baptized and his family, especially his grandfather Miguel, taught him to love the city. Graduated in Philosophy and Letters and in Geography and History, she worked in the Archives of … India, to the Provincial Delegation of Seville, to the Andalusian Health Service and to the Ministry of Culture. He gives lectures on the convents and brotherhoods of Seville and has published a book on them.
-Don’t you think that the silence that is breathed in convents is much more attractive now that there is so much noise everywhere?
-In today’s life we lack silence, silence to be able to think. If we don’t think, we are not people. And very often, we get carried away by the noise, the hustle and bustle, the superficiality, instead of thinking about ourselves.
-And the noise continues to grow with social networks…
-Yes, because there are people who live only in the virtual world. When you go see a brotherhood in the street, the first thing you see is a cell phone gang. Absolutely. And I always think the same thing, they record but they don’t live this unique moment. And when will you see these photos or videos? We all know wonderful professional photographers who we can ask for the photo, as we have done all our lives, and experience that moment. We live for appearances. And that worries me a lot more among young people, this cult of appearance and image. And in small reflection, because how many words can a tweet contain?
-It’s curious because they say that Seville is the city of appearances.
-I won’t say much about appearance. I stick to Unamuno’s definition of Sevillian: fine and cold.
-Those from outside find us funny…
-Yes, this happened to me in Madrid, at the Ministry, when I went there to take classes. Please! It’s absurd. The Sevillian has always been a very thoughtful person with a sense of proportion and measure, although I see that unfortunately we have less and less of it. This measure of a canopy step, which is exactly the measure of the street, of the city, of this proportion in any element of our life.
-What else are we losing?
-Well, even knowledge of the city itself. People no longer know how to get around. I was even asked in Plaza Nueva about Tetuán Street. But not a foreigner but a young person from here. That a foreigner dipped a hot drink in vermouth in a very famous bar in Seville is extremely curious. But they are foreigners and they obviously don’t know it. But for a young person, originally from Seville, to be in Plaza Nueva and not to know which street Tetuán is, that already seems very strong to me.
-If browsers and cell phones didn’t exist…
-Well, we shouldn’t trust browsers so much. I have worked with the police and I can say that there were accidents – and fatal accidents – because we blindly trusted them. It seems incredible, but there are those who have driven their car into a ravine because the navigator told them it was that way. So what’s going on that we’re not thinking about?
-With the use of technology, we have also lost the sense of measurement…
-Technology is that it is an instrument. As someone said, I’m not afraid of artificial intelligence, I’m afraid of the loss of natural intelligence. This scares me. Because it seems like we already trust tools so much that we don’t see anything else beyond the instrument that we’re using, which are fantastic, which can make things much easier for us, but they can’t replace the brain. It would be terrifying if that happened.
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