November 3, 1985

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.