What was going on when I was born?

How do you measure a triumph? In the theater, God may say one thing, while Mammon says another. A triumph is when they don't argue. ''Nicholas Nickleby,'' dear, sweet, rich, plummy, 8 1/2-hour ''Nicholas Nickleby'' (or ''Nick Nick,'' as the boys in its backroom call it) leaves the Plymouth Theater on Jan. 3. It is finished then, its odyssey over. Still, we have learned from it. The first thing we have learned is that people love it, that they talk about it, and that they will pay $100 for a ticket to see it. Give them a chance, in fact, and they will pay a good deal more. Observe the street outside the Plymouth before almost any performance. Who are those people accosting the ticket holders? They are buyers, or would-be buyers, trying to lay on money for tickets. The odd thing, however, is not that they are there (this kind of thing goes on all the time outside Madison Square Garden) but how infrequently they find someone who will sell them a ticket. The going price for ''Nicholas Nickleby'' among professional ticket brokers is $250; the going price on the street outside the Plymouth has never been established. Business is too slow. No one wants to sell. There is a story about a ticket being sold for $1,000, but it may only be a story. What is undeniable, however, is the passion to see ''Nicholas Nickleby.''

IT was a Saturday before Christmas, and all through the Computerland store here customers were busy testing functions and experimenting with games on a myriad of computers for sale. ''It's real neat,'' exclaimed 7-year-old Tanya Azzaro as she slid into a chair in front of one model and pressed her tiny fingers on the keyboard to play ''Donkeys,'' a demonstration game. At the rear of the store, Hans Trefny, a 15-year-old high-school sophomore, clutched an envelope bulging with the $1,300 he had saved from a part-time job with the Fairfield Public Library. He said he was going to put his earnings into a $3,000 computer that he had arranged with his parents, William, a retired school teacher, and Eycke, a physical therapist, to buy for Christmas as a joint venture.

Two days of fierce fighting in the Kandahar area between Afghan guerrillas and Soviet-backed Government forces ended on Nov. 28. The guerrillas said it had been the most severe fighting since they took up arms three years ago against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Some said the Government forces had paid heavily, even though their own losses had been severe. For a traveler in the middle, it was hard to tell who, if anyone, had won. In this sense, the battle seemed symbolic of this costly, but inconclusive, struggle. For a band of 27 guerrillas, the battle had burst suddenly and unexpectedly. The day before, they returned from the border area near Pakistan to the site of the fighting - this village between Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city, and the American-built airport now used as Soviet Air Force headquarters in Afghanistan.

NEWARK ALTHOUGH commuters are delighted by the news that NJ Transit, the state's mass-transit agency, will not increase fares on buses and trains again before next July, agency officials already have begun to worry about the bleak financial situation that seems certain to exist by then. At a meeting of the NJ Transit board of directors last Thursday, Jerome C. Premo, the agency's executive director, recommended that fares be held at their present level because recent Congressional budget actions had wiped out a $7 million deficit. ''The latest entry in our sweepstakes to close the budget gap is a provision that says that New Jersey will not have to pay back to Uncle Sam some $7 million in overpayments made by the Urban Mass Transit Administration,'' Mr. Premo said. The overpayments were made by U.M.T.A. between 1976 and 1978 to ease the takeover of the state's commuter rail lines by Conrail, the Federally subsidized railroad operator.

Reagan Administration officials want to relax or repeal many of the Federal rules that govern nursing home services, the rights of patients and the qualifications of the staff at long-term care facilities. Proposals being drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services would reduce Federal regulation of the industry at a time when many states have been forced to cut back on nursing home inspections because of a reduction in Federal money available for that purpose. The Federal Government pays state licensing agencies to inspect nursing homes that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which aid the aged and the poor. The homes must meet Federal health and safety standards to be eligible for Federal money under the programs.

PARIS IT still isn't clear whether Poland's new military junta has been able to establish order without law. Overwhelming force and massive arrests may eventually cow the country. But that can only be the end of a chapter in the struggle to reorganize and revive Polish society. The problems ahead for Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and his Military Council of National Salvation are even greater than the challenge quelled by tanks. The first, and greatest, in the words of the detained Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, shortly before last Sunday's coup, is that ''guns can't make us produce.'' Even if most workers are driven back to their posts by fear and sheer human necessity, they are not going to work more efficiently than during the period of lesser grumbling that led to Poland's economic collapse. General Jaruzelski apparently has the full support of the army and what remains of the Communist Party. But those remnants are the very apparatchiks whose stewardship led to disaster. Under military rule, they may be less corrupt but they aren't likely to be any less incompetent.

CITE the Federal Reserve if you will. Blame President Reagan or David Stockman or the supply-siders or the oil companies. Rail against the banks with their high rates or Detroit with its layoffs or the stores with their prices. Maybe it's the Democrats. Point the finger wherever you will, there's a Grinch out there and it's stealing Christmas. By the end of November, 8.4 percent of the labor force was unemployed, the most since the recession six years ago - and the numbers are still going up. Industries like automobiles and housing are locked into full-blown depressions and there's little cheer in many others, such as farming, major appliances, steel, lumber and textiles. ''There's been an ever-widening circle of weakness,'' said Murray L. Weidenbaum, chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. ''We're all expecting the economy to be down substantially in the fourth quarter, perhaps 5 percent.'' Indeed, Administration sources were quoted on Friday as saying that an early Commerce Department estimate for the fourthquarter gross national product projects a 5.4 percent decline on an annual basis, after inflation is taken into account.

NEW HAVEN ''MORE than the preacher's word, it is the musician's touch that is bringing the young to God again,'' said Pedro Arrupe, former Jesuit Superior General, addressing a Jesuit Institute for the Arts in Rome in 1972. Nearly 10 years later, his observations can be applied to the liturgical dance groups that are beginning to win acceptance among the clergy, parishioners, divinity schools and the so-called unchurched, who seek an alternate means of religious expression. Earlier this month, before students dispersed for the holidays, the Yale Liturgical Dancers performed a service to celebrate Advent, the four-week period before Christmas. ''We dealt with the 'Magnificat,' '' the hymn of the Virgin Mary in Luke 1: 46-55, said Kathleen LaCamera, a divinity student and the leader of a dance workshop. ''We did not act out the angel coming to Mary with the news that she would bear a son. We were not portraying her as a person, but putting into movement our own sense of her feelings and thoughts and intentions, using gestures of praise and awe.''

TROY HILLS, N.J. - Since the mid-1960's, three big interstate highways - 80, 287, and 78 -have sliced straight through the bucolic heartland of Morris and Somerset Counties, luring big money, big ambitions and big developments. The back-country byways are still postcard pretty. But the farms and fields along the three Federal highways have given way to millions of square feet of new office buildings and research parks. What has emerged is a corporate and commercial corridor that, in terms of volume of new square footage, is equivalent to two other suburban regions that have attracted brisk office-park development in recent years. They are a strip of central Westchester County from the Hudson River past White Plains to the Connecticut border, and the downtown of Stamford and adjacent Greenwich in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

The Polish Government has disclosed that criminal proceedings are being started against union activists seeking to instigate strikes in violation of martial law. The Government has also announced an administrative reorganization in which a Deputy Prime Minister, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, has been appointed chairman of a high-level agency, known as the Sociopolitical Committee. Mr. Rakowski, a leading liberal, had been head of the Government's Committee for Trade Union Affairs, which has been been suspended under martial law. American officials continued to view the crackdown with concern, but said there might be reason to hope that the situation would ease. A State Department spokesman said there were unconfirmed reports that clashes at a Silesian coal mine had resulted in more than the seven deaths the Polish Government acknowledged. (Page 20.)

GOVERNMENT leaders on the Island, from the county level on down to the villages, are taking a new look at the way they buy insurance in the wake of the trial and conviction of the Nassau Republican leader, Joseph M. Margiotta, on charges of extorting kickbacks from Nassau's designated insurance broker. Some towns, most recently Hempstead, have already announced that they are adopting a new policy of competitive bidding, shifting away from the old practice of designating one insurance borker. Officials, including school board members, are also taking a closer look at self-insurance for the bulk of their needs. Self-insurance not only avoids the problem of a single broker, but also cuts out the middleman altogether, thus saving money.

In 1971 the Justice Department won from organized real-estate brokers an agreement to stop prescribing standard commission rates for home sales. The hope was that this would encourage competition in the field, which in turn would make lower rates available to home buyers. Ten years later critics are still dissatisfied with the level of competition and are pressing new demands that they believe will force more of it. They maintain that commissions are still fairly standard throughout the country at 5 percent to 7 percent, and are kept there by anticompetitive industry practices. Their main assault is upon multiple-listing services, which they say discriminate against brokers who offer rate discounts.