What was going on when I was born?

The West 55th Street offices of the Jewish Guild for the Blind now have emergency-door exit signs that speak. The 29 signs, installed in the Guild's building last month, utter the words, ''Fire, this way out,'' in a synthesized but commanding voice, according to John Heimerdinger, executive director of the nonprofit organization.

IT has been more than two years since a Federal judge found that overcrowding at the Nassau County Correctional Center was unconstitutional, but the overcrowding continues. ''Conditions have considerably worsened,'' said David K. Kadane, the special master appointed by the Federal court to bring about a resolution of the problem. ''And the time has come to take decisive steps to bring about compliance'' with the court's orders, he added. Nassau County, acknowledging that the jail was indeed overcrowded, agreed to work toward solving the problem in a settlement with the Nassau County Legal Aid Society, which represented the inmates in the Federal suit. The agreement, which was approved Oct. 7, 1981, in a consent judgment by Judge George C. Pratt of Federal District Court, set a limit of 800 inmates at the East Meadow jail and banned the practice of having prisoners sleep on cots in corridors of the jail.

The Islanders played for 40 minutes tonight the way they had played for many of the 80 games of the regular season: They chugged, sputtered and stalled. But this time they avoided a crash, backed by the 35 saves of their goalie, Billy Smith. Bob Bourne and Ken Morrow scored goals in a 70-second span early in the third period, pacing the Islanders to a 5-1 victory over the Edmonton Oilers and a 3-0 lead in the Stanley Cup final playoff series. Sixty minutes of hockey now separate the Islanders from their fourth consecutive National Hockey League championship. They could wrap up the series in Game 4 Tuesday night at Nassau Coliseum.

''There is a lack of subtlety now, an indifference to what are ultimate concerns, a tendency to improvise rather than think something through clearly. When we started out, there were people like Mondrian, who regarded art as a calling, something that expressed the world of the spirit. People now are quite cynical about that. They have forgotten what art is all about.'' The speaker is Robert Motherwell, the 68-year-old Abstract Expressionist painter who was a leading figure of the first generation of the New York School. ''Culture is not monolithic. What has meaning at a given moment has a way of changing, for all kinds of reasons. What is specific to American art, as opposed to European art, is the idea of inventing yourself from scratch. The tradition of the New York School is, at least in part, precisely that. That is one of the criteria of seriousness and significance. That is itself a cultural renewal, not an obliteration of the previous culture's values and achievements.'' These are the words of 30-year-old David Salle, one of the best known of the new wave of neo-Expressionist painters.

When public television's ''Masterpiece Theater'' presents D.H. Lawrence's ''Sons and Lovers,'' beginning tonight at 9 on WNET/ Channel 13, it may surprise some viewers to see the name of Trevor Griffiths credited with the seven-part dramatization. What possible connection could there be between the author of ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' and the ebulliently left-wing British playwright best known for ''Comedians'' and as the co-author, with Warren Beatty, of the film ''Reds''? ''For me,'' says Mr. Griffiths, '' 'Sons and Lovers' is the first great working-class novel in English, the one in which Lawrence dared to test his experience against the form. Lawrence has been subjected to fierce criticism from the British left, which is only to do with his espousal later in life of mystical fascism. I dislike that about Lawrence, too. But it is a grave error to read that back into the entire oeuvre.'' The novel was published in 1913 and is indeed deeply autobiographical, documenting the sexual and intellectual awakening of a young man named Paul Morel in a Midlands mining community in turnof-the-century England. Although contemporary feminists get shorttempered with Lawrence, the novel is also about domestic life and women's work: Gertrude Morel, Paul's mother, is in many respects Lawrence's tribute to his own mother. She hovers possessively over Paul's involvement first with the prim and proper Miriam, then with the sensuous suffragette Clara Dawes.

THE EUROPEANS By Luigi Barzini. 267 pp. New York. Simon & Schuster. $14.95. THE original daydream was about a United States of Europe - a strong organization of nations with shared political views, common aims and ambitions, a joint defense policy, equivalent currencies, interlocked economies and freedom of movement over token frontiers. The last statesman to speak of an assembly of friendly countries stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals was General de Gaulle. He was, as a rule, a more practical visionary, but, then, we have no way of knowing if his vision included Great Britain. There also exists an ancient nightmare about a Europe united by force under a single, loathed flag: Adolf Hitler almost succeeded in bringing that black dream to life. The impossible project has had a frail descendant which is the subject of Luigi Barzini's new book: the loose, quarrelsome customs union of 10 democracies that make up the European Economic Community, or Common Market. The marvel is that even a frail and shrunken fragment of the old dream can exist, given the chronic European ailments of envy, jealousy, greed, suspicion, selfishness and tenacious national memories of the wrong events.

THE discovery of ''treasures'' in an Indian cemetery has halted work in a section of a Montauk luxury housing development. In a recent presentation to the East Hampton Town Board, Melville King, an archeologist, said he had unearthed remnants of a 17thcentury fort on the crest of Fort Hill and evidence of up to 136 graves containing artifacts of ''national importance.'' The board agreed to deny building permits on three lots of the development until the boundaries of the cemetery had been delineated by a certified archeologist. Meanwhile, descendants of the Montauk Indians and Montauk residents staged protests at the site last week, forcing a heavy-equipment operator to abandon his vehicle. The protestors contended that the developer, Fort Hill Associates, was excavating in areas containing Indian artifacts without town permission.

President Reagan has denied pardons to Jeb Stuart Magruder and E. Howard Hunt Jr. for their part in the Watergate burglary, Justice Department officials said today. Mr. Reagan rejected requests for their pardons before deciding to pardon Eugene R. Martinez, another convicted Watergate figure. Mr. Magruder and Mr. Hunt, both of whom served as aides in the Nixon White House, were convicted after the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters here. All three men were paroled after serving prison sentences, Mr. Magruder for obstruction of justice and Mr. Martinez and Mr. Hunt for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. According to Associate Attorney General Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Reagan decided all three requests in accordance with the recommendations of the Justice Department's Acting Pardon Attorney.

IN less than two weeks, the leaders of the Western alliance will g ather for a summit meeting in Williamsburg, Va., to try to map out a common economic strategy. Profound differences exist among the a llies - over control of East-West trade, energy policy, government i ntervention in the foreign exchange markets and policies to s tabilize the world banking system - but the discord is not likely t o be visible at the summit talks. For months, elaborate political e fforts have been under way to paper over the problems. Thus, the political discord that marred last year's economic summit meeting in Versailles, over some of the same issues, is likely to remain below the surface. The meeting last week in Paris of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - which involved, among others, the foreign and finance ministers of the countries that will be at Williamsburg - provided a preview of the good manners that can be expected in Williamsburg. French President Francois Mitterrand, who has been struggling to stabilize both the weak French economy and the franc, made a strong plea for a complete overhaul of the world financial system and a move back toward fixed foreign exchange rates. The French initiative was highly controversial, but that was difficult to tell from the official reactions in Paris. American officials merely said they thought it was ''premature.''

This tiny, forgotten Pacific harbor, once a key point on the gold rush route from New York to San Francisco, is about to get a new life as a port of call for Soviet fishing boats. In about three months a 7,000-ton Soviet drydock and a 60-foot-long floating pier will be anchored in the bay here to service Russian tuna vessels, according to Nicaraguan officials. Under an agreement signed a year ago in Moscow, the Nicaraguans are making available to the Soviet Union its second center of this kind on the Pacific coast of Latin America. The site has the advantage of being more centrally situated in areas fished by the Soviet fleet than the port of Paita that it now uses in northern Peru. The Soviet Union will pay Nicaragua $200,000 a year as a rental fee, the officials said.

Despite Syrian objections, President Amin Gemayel's Cabinet today unanimously approved the American-sponsored withdrawal agreement with Israel, a Cabinet statement said. The 10-member Cabinet also empowered Lebanon's chief negotiator with Israel, Antoine Fattal, to sign the accord as soon as a date and a place have been scheduled, the statement added. No date for the signing has been decided, but it is expected sometime next week. (In Washington, a State Department spokesman described the Lebanese Cabinet's approval of the accord as ''a constructive step in the ongoing process directed towards the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon.'')

It certainly looked like the Metropolitan Opera. There was James Levine beaming cherubically at the audience and launching into the downbeat. There were the well-worn Robert O'Hearn sets for ''Der Rosenkavalier.'' There was Aage Haugland, who made his Met debut in 1979 as Baron Ochs, repeating his most appealing characterization. There were even the familiar faces of the Met chorus and bit-players. But there were differences, too -significant ones. For one thing, all the female principals had never done their parts in New York: Elisabeth Soderstrom, who hasn't sung at the Met at all for 19 seasons, with her brilliantly acted, almost veristically bitter Feldmarschallin; Frederica von Stade, with her aristocratic, warmly emotional Octavian, and Kathleen Battle, who is singing her first Sophies ever and is already radiant in the part. Even more disorienting for a Met regular were the surroundings. There was a strange, rather unwieldy auditorium, seating 4,600 but with a cramped orchestra pit. There was an audience that looked rather better dressed than its New York counterpart on a typical Met evening and seemed more affable, more comfortable in its mid-American way. And there was a balmy Southern evening, with spring fully arrived long before the same could be said for Manhattan.