What was going on when I was born?

AS the countdown to the superpower summit in Geneva moves into the final 15 days, each side is mastering the art of making proposals that the other side cannot refuse outright but does not like. The upshot has been a growing mood of optimism about prospects for President Reagan's meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Nov. 19 and 20. Yet, as diplomats and Reagan Administration officials hasten to point out, the optimism applies more to atmospherics than to substance. President Reagan outdid the Soviet leader in the tactical maneuvering last week, although the contest was close. The President shored up his flanks with the European allies and Congress, and by making a new arms-control proposal put the ball back in Moscow's court. But on broader strategic positioning, particularly on the issue of whether arms control or regional questions would occupy center stage in Geneva, Mr. Gorbachev remains ahead. Only 10 days ago, at the United Nations, Mr. Reagan tried to shift the spotlight to regional disputes such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. His arms-control offer last week indicated that the Russians, backed by considerable pressure from American allies in Europe, were getting their way on summit priorities.

The South African Government imposed sweeping restrictions on local and foreign journalists today, including barring television crews, photographers and radio reporters from covering unrest in areas affected by an emergency decree. Journalists found guilty of defying the rules, which are considered the most stringent imposed on the press in recent memory, could face a jail sentence of up to 10 years or a maximum fine of about $8,000, or both. Government officials said reporters working for newspapers would be allowed into areas where unrest was occurring but would first have to report to the local police and obey their instructions. Newspaper reporters could be banned from covering unrest unless they agreed to a police escort. Correspondents' Group Protests The Foreign Correspondents' Association immediately condemned the regulations ''as the beginning of the slippery slide toward a totally controlled press'' in South Africa and called on its members' governments to lodge strong protests.

WHEN I left Sport magazine to become the editor in chief of Doubleday & Company's Literary Guild in 1960, its membership was at the vanishing point. The first meeting I went to with Doubleday's top brass was called to discuss the wisdom of killing the Guild and folding its membership into another of Doubleday's many clubs, the Dollar Book Club. I protested. ''I don't know anything about it,'' I said. ''Let me have a chance to look at it.'' So they set another meeting for th enext week, and by then I had a plan. It was outrageous, but it was a plan.

Afghan troops have ringed the United States Embassy in Kabul, cut off the electricity and doused it with powerful searchlights in an effort to force American diplomats to turn over a Soviet soldier who has been there since Thursday, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today. Expressing high-level concern for the first time about a potentially touchy situation with the Soviet Union as he goes to Moscow for talks with Soviet leaders, Mr. Shultz said the United States had protested about the harassment at the embassy. In a news conference held as he flew here from Washington on his way to Helsinki, the first leg of his Moscow mission, Mr. Shultz and other officials provided many more details about the incident than the State Department made known on Friday. An aide to Mr. Shultz said the secretary had personally protested to Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador, about the threatening moves around the embassy in Afghanistan on Thursday. The United States regards the Afghan troops as taking orders from the Soviet military command, which has more than 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan.

A NEW state map distributed by the Department of Commerce and Economic Development last month shows a series of concentric circles spreading out from Newark, emphasizing its status as northern New Jersey's transportation hub. Business leaders who stayed here during the years of decline after the 1967 riots agree that the city's transportation features made the revival now under way inevit-able. Major investments since 1980 include the 26-story headquarters of the Public Service Electric and Gas Company and additions to the Gateway Center office complex of the Prudential Insurance Company of America. Now being planned is development of the Passaic River waterfront, First of two articles including a $50 million skyscraper - the Newark Legal and Communications Center - that will be linked by fiber-optic cable to the Teleport satellite telecommunications facility on Staten Island. Beyond such development, however, dilapidated houses and storefronts and boarded-up buildings stand as reminders that, although Newark is a city on the mend, glowing health is still in the future.

Until recently, most of the modular housing built in the metropolitian area has been in subsidized low- and middle-income developments. But now this form of construction is gaining favor with developers of upscale condominium projects as well.

In the matter of the exhibition called ''The Treasure Houses of Britain,'' which opens to the public today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I have a confession to make. I did not believe that it could possibly be as good as it is. As an idea - an insubstantial pageant, no sooner dreamed of than lost to view - it had everything to recommend it. Though much despoiled in recent times, the English country house remains one of the great repositories of painting, drawing, sculpture and the decorative arts. It would be difficult, in fact, to name a learned enthusiasm that does not somehow, somewhere, lead us to the front door of an English country house. Sometimes the treasures in question come in ones and twos. Sometimes they come on the scale of a major European or American museum. Either way, they are there, and in alliance with the architecture, the shaven lawns, the landscaped gardens, the streams live with trout and the centenarian parks that often go with them, they constitute one of the great human achievements.

Florida's Kerwin Bell threw his second touchdown pass of the game to Ray McDonald with 7 minutes 18 seconds left in the fourth quarter to give the undefeated Gators a 14-10 victory today over Auburn, which was without Bo Jackson for much of the second half. The big Southeastern Conference triumph extended the Gators' streak without a loss to 18 games over two seasons and improved their 1985 record to 7-0-1. Galen Hall, who took over as head coach at Florida after three games of the 1984 season, has not lost in 16 games. Florida entered this game ranked No. 2 in the nation by The Associated Press poll and The New York Times computer rankings. Iowa, No. 1 in the A.P. poll, lost today, so Florida may move into that poll's top spot.

THE rich and famous live around East Hampton's Georgica Pond. Local baymen, however, make a living off it. Almost since the time the two factions first encountered each other at the bucolic pond, they have waged intermittent war over who will control it. The latest chapter in the recurring battle ended when the East Hampton Town Trustees ordered the bulldozing of a narrow path or ''gut'' through a sand bar on Oct. 24 so that the high waters of the brackish pond could rush out to sea. However, the next day sand buildup closed the gut again. It was the right time to open the gut, say the trustees, an autonomous body that by colonial patent ''protects and preserves'' lands and waters owned by the town. The opening, they say, allowed fish that had spawned in the pond to migrate south.

For most travelers, the bed-and-breakfast inn brings to mind quaint lodges in the English countryside or along the back roads of New England. But now the Channel Inn, a 30-room bed-and-breakfast, is been built in Manhattan as part of a condominium project at the northwest corner of 86th Street and York Avenue.

IT was an idea conceived of by two aides looking to put some sparkle in Gov. John N. Dempsey's 1967 inaugural address: Bring together under one umbrella those state agencies dealing with various forms of transportation. Eighteen years later, the State Department of Transportation is the largest single bureaucracy in the state government and the aide is a State Auditor who is recommending that the department be dismantled. Last week, the head of the Transportation Department agreed. ''The State of Connecticut took what was an excellent Highway Department and created a mediocre Department of Transportation,'' Commissioner J. William Burns told a legislative panel last week. It is studying a suggestion made last February in the State Auditors' annual report to the General Assembly that said: ''With the substantial responsibilities placed on the agency by the infrastructure program and the Bradley Airport expansion, consideration should be given to reducing the department's functions to a more manageable number.''

THE seagulls wheeled in apparent amazement over what had displaced them from every nook and cranny of Aqueduct on what should have been a bleak, placid early November day. Underneath were many thousands more humans than might ordinarily be found on the first Saturday in November - a mixture of rich and poor, all trying to keep warm and cash a ticket. The owners and their friends and families all looked warm in their seasonal attire, and most of the faces, hands and legs retained the year-round tan that one associates with Palm Springs, Palm Beach and assorted Caribbean islands. These durable tans, definitely not attained at Jones Beach or tar beach, glowed and twinkled in defiance of the gray sky and damp air.