History repeats.
So does your clock.
Recursivity reads the clock and finds you something worth reading. A verse at 3:16, a diary entry from this day three centuries ago, a meteor shower tonight. The matching digits light up so you can see the connection.
A moment from the library
4:17
OCT 4
Meditations 4.17
Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.
Marcus Aurelius · Classical Philosophy
Live, against your own clock. In the app the match is lit in both places at once.
Recursivity is a quiet app built on one idea: the time on your phone is a number, and numbers are how a great deal of writing has been indexed for centuries. Chapter and verse. Day and month. An atomic number. A sonnet’s place in the sequence.
So at 3:16 it can show you John 3:16, and at 11:11 something chosen for the moment. On any given date it can show you what happened then, or what somebody wrote in their own journal on that day a hundred or three hundred years ago. Whichever digits did the matching are lit in both places at once, on the clock above and on the entry’s own reference below, so the connection is something you see rather than something you are told.
What’s in it
85,229 entries, all bundled in the app and available with no connection. Every source is public domain or openly licensed, and every entry credits its source with a link out to it.
| Channel | Entries | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| World English Bible | 31,098 | Modern English translation, public domain |
| King James Bible | 31,102 | The 1611 translation |
| On This Day | 19,697 | Events from this date in history |
| Diaries | 2,007 | Amiel and Pepys, on the day they wrote it |
| The Sky | 536 | Solstices, moon phases and meteor showers, computed |
| Classical Philosophy | 493 | Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Epictetus, Sun Tzu |
| Shakespeare’s Sonnets | 154 | All 154, shown whole |
| Periodic Table | 118 | An element, its symbol and why it matters |
| Special Times | 24 | Written for us, for moments like 11:11 and noon |
What surfaces is yours to choose.
Each source is a channel you can turn up, turn down or switch off. Subjects you would rather not meet — death, war, violence and seven others — can be excluded outright, and will not appear on screen or in a notification. Notifications are optional: one, three or six a day, inside hours you set.
A page nobody else writes.
Once a day, at an hour you pick, Recursivity can ask you to put down a few lines about your own day, and a year later it hands them back so you can see what a year of them adds up to. It exports as plain text or JSON, and it stops asking if you stop writing.
It stays on your phone.
There is no account and no sign-in, and we run no analytics. Your journal is written to storage on your phone and is never sent to us. All 85,229 entries ship inside the app, so the library needs no connection. Read the privacy policy.