“Now it happened that Mr. Cherry, the carpenter, found a piece of wood that laughed and cried like a child.”
Books That Teach Us Human Values
Before my father died, he left me something more enduring than possessions; an awareness that life itself rests on moral ground. He often said, “Every story has a moral heartbeat, even if it’s faint.” It was one of those sayings that lingered. Years later, I’ve come to see how right he was.
Every good story, he believed, reaches a moral reckoning: the wicked fall, the just prevail, or at least, we sense what should have happened if justice had its way. When stories fail to do that, we feel cheated, as though the universe has bent out of shape. But why? If, as Richard Dawkins insists, we are merely “dancing to our DNA” in a purposeless cosmos, why do we care about fairness at all? Yet we do — instinctively, universally.
Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” My father, though not a philosopher, lived as if that were true. He saw in every narrative, every act of conscience, the reflection of a moral order that runs deeper than human opinion.
I grew up in Govan, a shipyard town on the edge of Glasgow. A place of stories. The air was thick with shipyard noise, but also with imagination. You could hear stories being told in pubs, at bus stops, or around the kitchen table. My father loved that world of words. He’d bring home books — sometimes borrowed, sometimes rescued from the dust of second-hand shops and leave them lying about.
When I was ten, I wandered into The Modern Book Shop, a cramped little cave of used books that smelled of paper, dust, and rain. Among the shelves, I found a small volume whose cover showed a wooden puppet with wild eyes. I opened it and read the first line:
“Now it happened that Mr. Cherry, the carpenter, found a piece of wood that laughed and cried like a child.”
That was my first encounter with The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Pinocchio fascinated me. He was mischievous, stubborn, and foolish, yet achingly human. Beneath the fantasy lay a truth I somehow recognised: to become “real,” he had to learn honesty, courage, and love. These weren’t arbitrary virtues. They were the warp and weft of what it means to live meaningfully. Even as a child, I sensed that Collodi’s tale was more than a fable; it was a mirror.
As I grew older, I began to see how that story echoed our own. We are all, in one way or another, wooden creatures longing for life. We stumble through temptation, wrestle with conscience, and yearn for transformation. The journey toward becoming “real” — authentic, upright, whole — is the human story itself.
That’s why I’ve never believed morality to be a mere social invention. If it were, why would the same moral chords resonate across cultures and centuries? Why do we root for justice, even in fiction? It’s because something within us — perhaps the image of God — knows that goodness, beauty, and truth are not imagined; they are discovered.
My father never spoke of theology. He didn’t need to. He simply pointed to stories. Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities, Aslan’s resurrection in Narnia — to him, these weren’t just plots; they were echoes of a greater narrative, the one written before time began: light overcoming darkness, love outlasting death.
Now that he’s gone, I see how profoundly his quiet faith shaped mine. His books still line my shelves, their pages bearing traces of his thumbprints. When I open them, I hear his voice, steady and sure, reminding me that life has meaning, and that our choices matter.
Like Pinocchio, I am still learning to become “real” — still stumbling, still finding my way toward courage and integrity. But the moral compass he gave me keeps its bearing.
In the end, the stories we cherish are never just about heroes and villains. They’re about us — about the moral universe we inhabit and the justice we intuit. My father believed that light, no matter how faint, will always find a way to shine. And I believe him still.
Image by Copilot
