What was going on when I was born?

THE United States last week sent a new mediator to the Middle East to take up the quest for reconciliation in Lebanon and security for Israel. Special envoy Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was President Ford's Defense Secretary, flew off to the two countries plus Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, where relations with Washington seemed close to the breaking point. American officials suspect Syria countenanced the terrorists who blew up the Marine headquarters at Beirut airport on Oct. 23, killing 239 Americans. President Reagan has threatened retaliation. But although 30 Navy ships were nearby in the Mediterranean, Washington said last week it had no plans to attack Syria. Damascus, however, announced Syrian antiaircraft batteries had fired on American Navy F-14 jets on reconnaissance missions over central Lebanon. They missed. In Beirut, gunmen fired on the airport, wounding a marine.

Although the city put a halt to the construction of so-called ''sliver'' projects earlier this year, the tall, narrow apartment buildings towering over others on their blocks will continue to rise throughout midtown as developers who had started work before the ban was adopted finish their projects. The new law says that buildings on lots up to 45 feet wide in primarily residential areas can be no taller than either the abuting buildings or the distance from its property line to that of buildings or structures directly across the street, whichever is greater.

Until last year, Whittier House, the 19th century mansion and adjoining town house at 172 and 174 Grand Street in Jersey City, was the home of the Jersey City Boys Club until last year. Then a fire forced the club out.

LESS than three months before American athletes will compete in the XIV Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, the United States Olympic Committee faces the most demanding period in its history. Raising $80.1 million to meet budget requirements, implementing new drug-testing procedures, monitoring its financial partnership with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and dealing with an uncertain political climate are only a few of the complex pressures that will confront the U.S.O.C. in the coming months. ''It's important that we have the best-prepared team and do exceedingly well in the 1984 Olympic Games,'' F. Don Miller, the executive director of the committee, said recently. ''By doing well, it will provide an incentive and a motivating factor for promoting the youth of our country to participate in amateur sports.'' But as the role of the U.S.O.C. has expanded from what some United States officials once termed a ''travel agency'' to the umbrella organization for amateur sports in the United States, the committee has been criticized for either trying to do too much in dealing with international federations and national governing bodies or not doing enough for American athletes. Such criticism often is based on comparisons of the role of the U.S.O.C. with successful state-subsidized sports programs in the Soviet Union, East Germany and other Eastern European countries.

President Reagan was preparing for a three-hour tour today in the grim demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, planning to address American troops and look by binoculars at what he called the forces of ''hatred and oppression'' across the demarcation line in North Korea. An advance battalion of news personnel crowded into this camp nestled in foothills not far from North Korean military outposts as Mr. Reagan prepared to depart from Seoul, the South Korean capital, 26 miles to the south. ''You are on the front lines of freedom,'' the President declared in remarks prepared for the visit. ''The Communist system to the north is based on hatred and oppression.''

Peter Brook, the distinguished British director whose inventive productions of ''Marat- Sade,'' ''King Lear'' and ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' deeply influenced contemporary theater, returns to Broadway on Thursday with a new venture - opera. Mr. Brook will present his interpretation of Georges Bizet's ''Carmen,'' entitled ''La Tragedie de Carmen,'' at the Vivian Beaumont with a carefully trained company of singer-actors that includes no fewer than five alternating principal casts. The new ''Carmen,'' which has been immensely successful in Paris and on tour in Europe, was developed in collaboration with two eminent French artists, the composer Marius Constant and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carri ere, at Mr. Brook's Paris-based International Center of Theater Research. Operated for the past 12 years by the director and his producer and close associate Micheline Rozan, the Center is funded in part by the French Government. There, with his company and his own theater, the Bouffes du Nord, Mr. Brook is free from the restrictions that hamper most directors, and his fame and artistic prestige virtually guarantee that his work will be taken seriously.

Ten New York hospitals are preparing an experimental program to shorten the hospital stays of some surgical patients and to shift more surgery from hospital operating rooms to clinics and outpatient surgery centers. The program, which is expected to begin next year, is intended to reduce costs. It is also intended to cut the long waits for elective surgery at many of the city's teaching hospitals. Health officials said the program would save public health funds because about 90 percent of all surgery was financed by the public Medicaid program for the poor, by the Medicare program for the elderly and by employee health benefit programs and private insurers, such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Greater New York. According to Steven Sieverts, head of the program and a Blue Cross Blue Shield vice president, surgeons in participating hospitals will ask ''carefully selected patients'' to volunteer to be discharged earlier than usual or have their surgery done without hospitalization. He estimated that ''thousands'' of patients would agree to take part by the end of the first year. The procedures will include such cases as hernia repairs, removal of gall bladders and the setting of broken bones. Dr. Walter Wichern, head of surgery at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, which is participating in the program, said shorter hospitalization and outpatient surgery were more feasible now because of improved surgical techniques, more use of localized anesthesia and a new surgical attitude that emphasizes swift ambulatory recovery.

''IWAS asking for a tax and you don't do those things during an election,'' said Mayor Angelo R. Martinelli of Yonkers last week, as he reflected on his successful bid for a fifth term in office. ''I have great faith in the people. of Yonkers. Go level with them and even if what you're saying is unpopular, they'll respect you.'' In Mr. Martinelli's case, they also provided enough votes to overcome three challengers in a campaign that some observers had believed the Republican could not win.

A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a stubborn enemy of Pentagon waste, says he has spent 17 years fighting what he calls ''the Calvinist argument about military spending: the belief that costs are predestined and cannot be affected by mere man.'' Whether Mr. Fitzgerald is getting anywhere is an open question. He said in an interview he was being blocked from carrying out his duties as one of the chief cost cutters for the Air Force and might have to seek relief in Federal court. Mr. Fitzgerald became perhaps the most famous of all Pentagon whistleblowers when he disclosed to Congress in 1969 that the price being paid for Lockheed C-5A cargo planes had approximately doubled over original contract estimates.

Excerpts from address, page 36. ROME, Nov. 12 - Pope John Paul II called today on the scientists of the world to abandon their ''laboratories and factories of death'' and replace them with ''laboratories of life.'' In a discourse that is could cause anguish for some Roman Catholics and others engaged in military research, the Pope urged scientists to insure that ''the discoveries of science are not placed at the service of war, tyranny and terror.'' The Pope stopped just short of explicitly urging all military researchers to quit their jobs. But a source close to the Pope, who asked not to be named and said he had contributed some of the ideas for the speech, said that the Pope strongly implied that military research should be abandoned. He said the Pope had never publicly expressed such strong sentiments on the issue.

Auburn, which only three years ago was on probation and not winning often, played its way into the Sugar Bowl by beating previously undefeated Georgia, 13-7, before a crowd of 82,122 today in Sanford Stadium. Al Del Greco, who missed three field-goal attempts, booted two field goals in the first half to provide the margin of victory for Auburn after Lionel James scored the Tigers' only touchdown on a 3-yard run in the opening quarter. In its third season under Coach Pat Dye, a Georgia alumnus who played guard on its football team, Auburn also achieved at least a tie for the Southeastern Conference title. The Bulldogs had won the championship for the last three years. This is only the second time in the 50-year history of the S.E.C. that Auburn has won the conference title. It won the first time in 1956.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, a visiting scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was co-editor of ''The Mind's Eye: Fantasies & Reflections of Self & Soul.'' ALAN TURING The Enigma. By Andrew Hodges. Illustrated. 587 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $22.50. Can true intelligence be embodied in any sort of substance - organic, electronic or otherwise? Is mind more than pattern? How can we distinguish between a genuine mind and a clever facade? Do emotions and intellects belong to separate compartments of ourselves? Could machines have emotions? Could machines be enchanted by ideas, by people, by other machines? Could machines be attracted to each other, fall in love? Could a machine destroy itself purposefully one day, planning the entire episode so as to fool its mother machine into ''thinking'' (which, of course, machines cannot do) that it had perished by accident?