Hello please help i’ll give brainliest

Which phrase in this excerpt from james joyce's "araby is a participial phrase? north richmond street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the christian brothers' school set the boys free. an uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. the other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces the former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. among these i found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: the abbot, by walter scott, the devout communicant and the memoirs of vidocq. i liked yellow. the wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which i found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. he had been a very charitable priest, in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

However, the idea of real-life people living in what would become the united states for thousands of years before columbus ever left spain never dawned on me. what would be the best way to revise this sentence for greater clarity? a) however, the fact that columbus left spain thousands of years after people settled what would become the united states never dawned on me. b) it never dawned on me, however, the idea of real-life people living in what would become the united states for thousands of years before columbus ever left spain. c) however, the fact that people were already living in what would become the united states for thousands of years before columbus ever left spain never dawned on me. d) however, the idea never dawned on me that long before columbus ever left spain, real-life people lived for thousands of years in what would become the united states.

What’s the importance of gaining a general understanding of and interpretation of the work of literature.