Seeing, to John Dos Passos, was also an imaginative process whose subjective components could be successfully tempered. Writing over twenty years later about the problems of finding “elbow room” within an increasingly bureaucratized society, he asserted the need for looking at American institutions with “fresh understanding, untrammeled by prejudice or partisan preconceptions, ” and advanced objective observation as the preferred means of discovery. “Observing objectively demands a sort of virginity of the perceptions, ” he explained. “A man has to clear all preconceived notions out of his head in a happy self-forgetfulness where there is no gap between observation and description.” In so falling into “the uneducated man's naive and ignorant frame of mind” and meeting each new phenomenon “with a clean slate as if you had never heard of it before, ” it was possible to “see things as they are, instead of as we were told they ought to be” (Occasions 72–3, 75).