Roughly a month ago, we passed the one-year anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace — one of our generation’s greatest writers, a veritable genius — with disappointingly little fanfare here at Cornell. As far as I can tell, our university’s English department, which normally does a fabulous job celebrating good writing, neglected to mark the occasion at all.

Wallace, who killed himself on Sep. 12, 2008, at the age of 46, deserves better.

Of course, there is nothing I can write about Wallace that hasn’t already been written. No angles I can take, parallels I can draw, eulogies I can compose, that haven’t been taken, drawn and composed already. Even this concession I’m making right now is trite and flat and unmoving, because it, too, is stale.

This isn’t to suggest that there’s a shortage of things to say about Wallace. Not at all. In fact, there’s probably more to say about him — as a prodigious thinker, a perspicacious theorist, a humble, empathetic, magnanimous human being — than there is about nearly anyone born within the last 100 years.

No, there’s a decidedly different reason why writing about Wallace is so tough. It’s because his admirers, including many of his erstwhile critics, have been so exhaustive in paying tribute to the man that they’ve actually almost exhausted the subject.

Almost.

They haven’t, and won’t ever, because what makes literature — and all art, for that matter — so transcendent, so essential to the human spirit, is that it is in fact inexhaustible, indefatigable, forever capable of inspiring. (How else to explain why we’re still moved by The Iliad and Beowulf and Crime and Punishment? Why we still find the music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven so rapturous? Why we still flock around the Mona Lisa to bear witness to her beguiling smile?)

When I discovered Wallace — posthumously, this past summer — I found myself connected to him and his work in a way I had never before experienced with an author. Wallace is best known as a fiction writer, and namely for Infinite Jest, his sprawling, wildly ambitious 1996 novel, which is already considered one of the seminal works of contemporary literature. However, I found myself drawn more to his non-fiction and, consequently (I would argue), to the man himself.

The first DFW-related work I read was not anything written by Wallace but instead articles written about him. Lengthy profiles in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone painted the portrait of a man with a crackling wit and disarming intelligence, the once-in-a-generation type of mind that secured him his literary fame.

Wallace’s electric mind was capable of riffing on just about anything, as attested to by the startling range of his non-fiction. He wrote dispatches from the Illinois State Fair, a Caribbean cruise ship and John McCain’s 2000 Presidential campaign. He weighed in on esoteric and / or neglected fields of inquiry, like the ethics / epistemology of boiling lobster, the prescriptive / descriptive debate in modern linguistics and the inherently ironic nature of television.

If good writers take the ordinary and make it extraordinary, then Wallace’s writing goes one step further: It takes the extraordinary and consecrates it, brings us, the readers, down on our knees and bowing before it.

The first writing by Wallace that I read, two collections of his essays, had me at once dizzied, thrilled and dismayed — the latter because Wallace’s writing was so juiced-up and percolating with big ideas and dazzling language that it made the work of other writers seem paltry by comparison. For example, this summer, after reading nothing but DFW for over a month, I tried switching to a novel by Chang Rae-Lee, one of my favorite authors. I got 25 pages in before I lamented how lacking the experience was now that I had read Wallace, like being relegated to the kiddy pool after thrashing around in the ocean.

What makes Wallace singular, however, is that he was never interested in using his intelligence as leverage, in undermining or taking cheap shots at the people he disagreed with or in asserting his own (indubitable) intellectual superiority.

Wallace’s essay on experiencing 9/11 with a group of Midwestern women from his church is one of the best demonstrations of his munificent spirit. Where other, less sagacious writers may have used the occasion to belittle the women, all pious and traditional, as simple-minded, Wallace renders a compassionate account, one much more penetrating and affecting for its lack of pretension.

Still, I can think of no better illustration of Wallace’s benevolence than his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. The speech is a plea to recognize the things in life truly worth worshipping — “compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things” — and, in many ways, it’s profoundly life-affirming.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day,” Wallace says.

But the speech also betrays Wallace’s inner torment, his heart bursting with emotion, his head roiling with anguish. It betrays a man who so cared for other people, who so thoroughly grasped life’s simultaneous joy and desolation, beauty and burden that, horrified by this knowledge, he took his own life.

“The capital-T Truth is about life before death,” he says. “It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”

Wallace, it seems safe though awfully perfunctory to say, was way too smart for his own good.