What was going on when I was born?

Amid all the tension in the Middle East came a welcome - though still tentative - note of detente from the religious and ethnic factions that have been carrying on a civil war in Lebanon for 10 years. Nabih Berri, leader of the main Shiite movement, Amal, and a member of the Lebanese Cabinet, announced that the warring militias had agreed to a pact mediated by Syria and that they would probably sign it this week.

Two months after the South African Government imposed sweeping restrictions on the press, the vivid television images of protest and violent suppression that many believe helped galvanize American sentiment on South Africa have become increasingly scarce. Broadcast journalists say the restrictions have changed television coverage of events in South Africa, where more than 1,000 people, most of them black, have died in the unrest since September 1984. The bans, they say, have forced them to rethink developments in that country and their approach in reporting them. Under the rules announced Nov. 2, all reporters, print and broadcast, must be under police supervision when they cover scenes of unrest in areas covered by the Government's state of emergency decree. But pictures or sound recordings of unrest in those areas are banned. Television and radio therefore suffer more than newspapers and magazines, though the same restrictions apply to still photographers as to video and sound technicians.

THIS is what the wild-card round is for: It makes money for the league, it gives people something to do during the holidays and it protects teams with good records who do not win their division title. After that, the wild-card teams are on their own. The Jets and the New England Patriots finished the regular season with 11-5 records in the same division, behind the Miami Dolphins. By virtue of the wild-card draw, they got to slam each other around on the hard-as-a-rock floor of Giants Stadium yesterday.

White House budget officials, under pressure from a new antideficit law, have urged President Reagan to cut back a scheduled military pay increase, payments to weapons companies for basic research and other Pentagon spending plans in the budget he will send Congress in February, Pentagon and other Administration officials say. Pentagon officials, however, say Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger insists on a budget of $314.7 billion, about 10 percent higher than Congress appropriated for the current year. Mr. Weinberger has argued that such an increase is needed to catch up to the level Mr. Reagan and Congress agreed on in May, long before passage of the law to eliminate the deficit by 1991. Symbol of Commitment One senior Pentagon official said this week that the military realized such a budget increase would stand no chance of Congressional approval but that Mr. Weinberger viewed the figure as a sign of the President's continued commitment to rearmament. Mr. Reagan, in signing the antideficit measure Dec. 12, said he intended to avoid ''cuts in defense that endanger our national security.'' But officials said at the time that he had not necessarily ruled out some trims in the military budget request for the fiscal year 1987, which begins next Oct. 1.

The Union Terrace Condominium Residence, a 57-unit apartment building near the Main Street stop of the No. 7 IRT subway line in Flushing, Queens, is a new addition to a neighborhood of much larger and older projects. Forty of the one- and two-bedroom apartments, which feature a closed-circuit television security system, no-frost refrigerators, range hoods and dishwashers, already have been sold at prices ranging from $121,000 to $158,000, according to the developers.

His genius he was quite content In one brief sentence to define: Of inspiration one percent, Of perspiration, ninety-nine. Thomas Alva Edison THEY packaged hamburgers and automobile loans. They created intelligent cameras and nostalgic record albums. In the process, they learned that Thomas Edison was right: Ideas come often; hard work makes a few successful. This year, various innovators made a success of concepts that others had tried and found wanting. For example, Steven Gottlieb's ''inspiration'' was that the public would pay a high price for recordings of old television tunes if the sound quality was high. His ''perspiration'' went into compiling theme songs from television shows of a previous generation and re-recording those for which the original soundtrack had deteriorated. Mr. Gottlieb's two-record album, although at $17.95 the most expensive television-nostalgia album to hit the market, was the first to be a runaway success.

The sure hands that helped carry the Jets to the American Conference wild-card playoff game were not so sure today. The Jets committed four turnovers, and three were turned into scores by the New England Patriots, who won by 26-14 and played an error-free game in breaking with their tradition of losing in the playoffs. The victory lifted the Patriots to a meeting with the Raiders in Los Angeles next Sunday in an A.F.C. semifinal game. The Patriots, who lost by 35-20 to the Raiders earlier this season, had not won a playoff game since 1963.

A GREAT virtue of the Cornell University graduate program in history before the war was its informality. I was thus able to follow the dictates of my own spirit, and to an amazing degree. This was the situation into which ''A Study of History'' by Arnold J. Toynbee intruded. I well remember first catching sight of those three volumes, bound in bright green, nestling at eye level in one of the bays of the White Library. It was a completely random encounter: the books still smelled of fresh print, and had never been used before. Nor did I have the slightest idea of the experience that lay before me when I took them down from the shelves. What could be more noncommittal than ''A Study of History,'' with an unknown name on the spine? But I was soon engrossed. An easy chair adorned the central bay of the White Library, some 15 feet from the place in the shelves where I stumbled on the ''Study,'' and there I planted myself for the next two or three days to read Toynbee's three volumes through in one gulp. That was all that was then available. Volumes Four to Six had been published in England in September 1939, but they had not yet reached the shelves of Cornell's library.

The identities and affiliation of the assailants who mounted the attacks at airports in Rome and Vienna have not been established, and so the motivation behind the terrorism is still obscure. A note found on the sole surviving terrorist in the Rome attack said it was in reprisal for the Israeli air raid on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization near Tunis last August. Thus it appeared that the attacks were a kind of mad, suicidal howl of anger and frustration directed at Israel. But there was speculation among Middle East experts that they could also have roots in inter-Arab struggles. According to this line of reasoning, another goal of the attacks could be to help block the peace effort mounted by King Hussein of Jordan and Yasir Arafat, the P.L.O. leader.

Feldman Equities Corporation, a Lake Success, L.I., development company, plans to build a 35-story office building at 120 West 45th Street, between Avenue of the Americas and Broadway. It will replace the old Knickerbocker Hotel.

ALTHOUGH it has been only five weeks since President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev met in Geneva, aides are starting the climb to the next summit - the Soviet leader's visit to Washington, which may be as early as next June. ''The Geneva meeting was important,'' a State Department official said, ''but the Washington summit will be crucial if we are going to stabilize Soviet-American relations.'' His point, underscored by the continuing public differences between Moscow and Washington over arms control issues, and their apparent inability to see eye to eye on pressing regional issues, was that in Geneva the two leaders were able to get to know each other and sign some long-overdue cultural and other bilateral agreements. In keeping with the improved atmosphere, each leader will address the other's countrymen on radio and television on New Year's Day. It will be the first Presidential television talk to the Soviet people since Richard Nixon's in 1972.

THE biggest wave of corporate acquisitions and buyouts in American history is beginning to cause widespread alarm. The merger mania has sent stock prices to levels no one ever envisioned for 1985. But in the process, American business has gone heavily into debt to pay for its multi-billion dollar takeovers. And this boom in corporate debt, particularly with its use of high-yielding, less-than-investment grade ''junk bonds,'' is bringing warnings even from those involved in financing the megadeals. ''I'm worried about what this leveraging up will do,'' said Thomas S. Johnson, president of the Chemical Bank, which despite Mr. Johnson's concern participates in takeover lending. ''I'm worried that the aggregate of all these things, including leveraged buy-outs, is simply Some of the players in 1985's deals, Page 7 a perverse result of greed and not a logical, rational thing. I don't know how all this debt will be serviced.'' The situation has so troubled Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, that he now wants to restrict the use of junk bonds, a step that would thwart many highly-leveraged takeovers.