Make permalinks point to corresponding page of home?

I want to make it so that permalinks don’t take you to a special page with just the one post on it. Rather, I want them to take you to the home page, but paged back as if you had pressed ‘Older Posts’ until you got to the appropriate page that contains the post our permalink points to. Bonus points if we can use an anchor to center the view on that post (I already insert a unique anchor into every post’s title for this purpose).

I want do to this because I want the site to have more of an overall timeline feel. I don’t want links to take you to lonely pages with a single post on them because the amount of content in each post is relatively small. I want my users to see the post in context, with the same posts surrounding it as it had the day it was posted.

To do this, I’ve tried single.php in my twentyeleven theme and changing the default single query using both new WP_Query and get_posts. Curiously, this hasn’t worked at all – I can’t even get multiple posts to show. Perhaps a separate issue? I would love any possible answer to this issue, but I’d also appreciate a recommendation on what the ‘best’ way to accomplish this behavior is. Edit single.php? Add a filter? Override the permalinks function?

Thanks in advance.