austere and monkish

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (left) would not have had to worry about his carbon footprint. His rooms in Cambridge were almost bare of furniture. He didn't mind what he ate (it's said) so long as it was always the same thing. He even became a gardener in an Austrian monastery and slept in a potting shed.

The monkish austerity of his prose style in Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus, writes Terry Eagleton, was (among other things) a reaction against a Viennese world of cream cakes and swollen bodies.